Tsebelis G. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work

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Forthcoming Princeton UP and Russell Sage Foundation

11/01/01

VETO PLAYERS:

HOW POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS WORK

BY GEORGE TSEBELIS

UCLA

TO MIRIAM, ALEXANDER, AND EMILY

FOR THEIR INDISPENSIBLE SUPPORT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 11

PART I: VETO PLAYERS’ THEORY 32

CHAPTER 1: INDIVIDUAL VETO PLAYERS 35

CHAPTER 2: COLLECTIVE VETO PLAYERS 63

PART II: VETO PLAYERS AND INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS 100

CHAPTER 3: REGIMES: NON-DEMOCRATIC, PRESIDENTIAL, AND

PARLIAMENTARY 103

CHAPTER 4: GOVERNMENTS AND PARLIAMENTS 137

CHAPTER 5: REFERENDUMS 171

CHAPTER 6: FEDERALISM, BICAMERALISM, AND QUALIFIED

MAJORITIES 200

PART III: POLICY EFFECTS OF VETO PLAYERS 238

CHAPTER 7: LEGISLATION 242

CHAPTER 8: MACROECONOMIC POLICIES 272

PART IV: SYSTEMIC EFFECTS OF VETO PLAYERS 299

CHAPTER 9: GOVERNMENT STABILITY 302

CHAPTER 10: BUREAUCRACIES AND JUDGES 322

CHAPTER 11: VETO PLAYERS ANALYSIS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 360

CONCLUSIONS 412

BIBLIOGRAPHY 422

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The beginning of this book can be traced back, long before the beginning of my

professional life in political science, to my undergraduate days at the Institut des Sciences

Politiques in Paris, when I read Duverger and Sartori on parties and party systems, and Riker on

political coalitions. Like the two first, I was interested in understanding how political systems

work, and like the third author, I was interested in understanding it in a simple way.

I remember trying to grasp the distinctions that the official classifications made: What is

the difference between a parliamentary and a presidential system, besides the fact that in the first

the legislative and the executive can dissolve each other while in the second they cannot? What

is the difference between a two and a multiparty system, besides the fact that the first leads to a

single party government and the second does not (in fact, coming from Greece, a country with a

multiparty system and single party governments, I knew this stylized fact to be incorrect). Things

were becoming fast more complicated and even incomprehensible when considering multiparty

democracies like Sartori, because of “moderate” and “polarized” multipartyism: I could not

understand why fewer than five parties were associated with a moderate system and more than

six with a polarized one.

The years went by and I went to Washington University in St. Louis for graduate school

and I got the basic ideas about how at least one political system works (the US Congress).

Shepsle and Weingast taught me that politicians are rational and try to achieve their goals, that

institutions are constraints to the deployment of human strategies, and therefore studying

institutions populated by rational players leads us to understand different outcomes (institutional

equilibria according to Shepsle).

Though these insights were revealing and accurate in their description of US institutions,

they were not addressing my initial questions of different parties and different systems. I was

looking for answers that did not exist at the time because rational choice analysis was completely

established in American politics, but completely underdeveloped (as I discovered the year I went

out in the job market) in comparative politics. In fact, my comparative classes were essentially

replicating Duverger and Sartori instead of going beyond them.

In the beginning of my professional life I was addressing specific problems that I could

solve rather than global comparative questions (tenure requirements being what they are I would

not be writing these lines if I didn’t). The questions remained for quite a while without any

handle for answers until I saw Thomas Hammond present a preliminary version of a co-authored

paper with Gary Miller that later became the APSR article “The Core of the Constitution.”

Hammond and Miller were making an argument about the American Constitution: that adding

players with the power to veto increases the set of points that cannot be defeated (the core); that

providing the power to overrule such vetoes decreases the size of the core; that the size of the

core increases with the distance among chambers. As soon as I heard the argument I started

wondering whether it could be generalized for other political systems, particularly parliamentary

and with strong parties? In that case we would have a general way of understanding legislating in

all political systems.

My thinking was now focused on a series of questions generated by this article: First, the

analysis was presented in a two dimensional space. What would happen if one increased the

number of policy relevant dimensions? Would the core continue to exist or would it disappear?

Second, can the analysis apply to parliamentary systems that by definition do not have the

separation of powers? Third, can the model apply to political parties instead of individual

congressmen?

For my purposes affirmative answers in all three questions were necessary. I tried to find

the answers to these questions during the period 1992-93 while I was a National Fellow at the

Hoover Institution. With respect to question 1, whether Hammond and Miller’s analysis

generalizes in more than two dimensions I read an article providing an affirmative answer. The

article claimed that as long as two chambers in a bicameral system did not have members with

preferences overlapping, the core existed in any number of dimensions. I was very disappointed

in what I considered a very strong (that is, unrealistic) assumption of non-overlapping

preferences. While looking at the proof I discovered that it was mistaken and the core did not

exist except under extremely restrictive conditions. This discovery led me practically into

despair. I felt that I had come so close to answering questions that had puzzled me for many

years, and now the answer was eluding me again.

The next step in the process was a series of models that have now been included in my

previous book Bicameralism, which demonstrate that even when the core does not exist, another

concept from social choice theory, the “uncovered set” (the definition of the term is besides the

point here, but exists in Chapter 1) provides very similar results.

I found a hint of the answers to questions 2 and 3 in Riker’s (1992) article "The

Justification of Bicameralism" where parties in coalition governments were working essentially

the same as chambers in a bicameral system: in both cases an agreement was necessary for a

change in the status quo.

With these findings in mind I wrote a paper attempting to compare across political

systems by comparing the size of each system’s uncovered set. The paper was too technical, and

incomprehensible. Miriam Golden who is usually a very tolerant reader of my work made me

understand these problems quite well: “Why are you doing these things? What do they tell me

about the world?” Her clear words made me understand that I needed to take a different tack and

make the findings relevant.

I decided to look at the winset of the status quo instead of the uncovered set, and this

provided a dramatic simplification, which conveyed to readers the relevance of my analysis.

Rewriting the paper on the basis of veto players and winset of the status quo did not change the

substantive results, but made it much more comprehensible and usable. The paper was long, so

after inquiring which journal would accept an article longer than usual I submitted it to the

British Journal of Political Science. It was immediately accepted, published in 1995 and received

the Luebbert Award for best article in comparative politics in 1996.

At the same time I participated in a group organized by Herbert Doering that was

studying West European legislatures. Doering promised me that if I wrote a veto players article

for his edited volume he would make sure that usable data on legislation from the project would

become available to me for testing the veto players framework. His proposal led to a second

article on veto players, as well as to a dataset that tested the main argument I was proposing: that

many veto players make significant policy changes difficult or impossible. Doering had the

brilliant idea to identify laws that produced “significant changes” from an encyclopedia of labor

law that was written for international labor lawyers who would practice law in a country

different from their own and needed to know the significant pieces of legislation in other

countries. The test corroborated the theory and was published in the American Political Science

Review in 1999 and was the runner up for the Luebbert Award for best article in Comparative

politics in 2000.

While working on these issues I was constantly expanding the veto players theory either

on my own or along with other researchers. I wrote an article for a special issue of Governance

dedicated on political institutions. In that article I calculated a missing link: what happens to

policy outcomes when collective veto players decide by qualified majorities instead of simple

majorities; in addition, I spelled out several of the consequences of policy stability. I

demonstrated that policy stability affects government instability in parliamentary systems, and

the role of judges and bureaucrats regardless of political regime. Later, reading the literature on

bureaucracies and the judiciary I discovered that there is a difference between indicators

measuring institutional independence of judiciary and bureaucracies from the political system,

and behavioral independence of the same actors. My interpretation was that seemingly

contradictory expectations of judicial and bureaucratic independence in the literature may be

compatible after all. Working with Simon Hug I analyzed the consequences of veto players on

referendums. Working with Eric Chang I found out another indication of policy stability: the

structure of budgets in OECD countries was changing slower when the government was

composed of many veto players.

My veto players findings were also being confirmed by my work on the European Union,

where I was discovering the importance not only of actors who can veto, but also of actors who

can shape the agenda. There was nothing new to the importance of agenda setting argument

(McKelvely has said everything there is to know in his 1976 article), except that European

institutions were quite complicated, and it was difficult to see how the many actors were

interacting in a multiple dimensional setting. Having written an article on that, I proceeded in

identifying the differences introduced by European treaties consistently in three-year periods

from 1987 until today. I have published some one and a half dozen articles on the issue of EU

institutions, some of them on my own, some with my students, some with Geoff Garrett trying to

go beyond the statement that EU institutions are complicated. Lots of this work led to

controversies, and the findings are summarized in one chapter in this book. The relevance of EU

to the veto players framework presented in this book is that EU institutions are too complicated

and too variable to be analyzed any other way.

I would like to thank the editors of the British Journal of Political Science, American

Political Science Review, Governance, for permitting me to reprint some of the ideas included in

the original articles. While this book had an overwhelmingly long gestation period, I was very

lucky to receive the helpful advice of extremely reliable people. I would like to thank Barry

Ames, Kathy Bawn, Shaun Bowler, Eric Chang, William Clark, Herbert Doering, Jeffrey

Frieden, Geoffrey Garrett, Barbara Geddes, Miriam Golden, Mark Hallerberg, Simon Hug,

Macartan Humphreys, Anastassios Kalandrakis, William Keech, Thomas König, Amie Keppel,

Gianfranco Pasquino, Ronald Rogowski, Daniel Treisman, for reading the manuscript or parts of

it and giving me extended comments which led sometimes to long discussions and longer

revisions.

I would like to thank the Russell Sage Foundation that provided me with a Fellowship

and made intense work on the project possible. Eric Wanner and his staff (in particular Liz

McDaniel who edited the whole manuscript) made my life there so pleasant. I only wish many

happy returns were possible! (In fact, I tried very hard but in vain to persuade Eric to repeal the

local 22d amendment and consider second applications). I enjoyed every minute in New York,

and the excitement of living in the “millennium capital of the world” improved my productivity

(if not my production).

Chuck Myers of Princeton UP read successive manuscripts and provided me with many

useful suggestions. Thanks go always to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for providing me with a

stimulating immediate environment while I was working. Finally, (keeping the punch line last) I

want to thank my family, Miriam, Alexander, and Emily for providing me with the necessary

emotional support to finish this extensive project.