Tsebelis G. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work

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When collective veto players are deciding by qualified majorities, all these calculations

are necessary in order to identify the location of the winset of the status quo. For example, this is

the case for the Council of Ministers of the EU, for the override of a presidential veto in the US,

for legislatures with respect to constitutional issues (Belgium), or for the lower chamber to

overrule the upper in some countries like Chile and Argentina (see Tsebelis and Money 1997 for

examples). However, what is not obvious is that the qualified majority calculations are necessary

for some additional cases, which I will call: “qualified majority equivalents”. Let me discuss

such cases.

1. Non-constitutional requirements. While the American Senate formally makes decisions

by simple majority of its members, the possibility of filibuster modifies the situation

significantly. If a Senator decides to filibuster a bill, the only possibility to end his efforts is a 3/5

vote of the Senate. Consequently, 40 Senators can prevent legislation from being adopted. For

any significant legislation to pass the United States Senate, an agreement of the minority party is

required (unless this party does not control 40 seats). In other words, the American Senate is a

qualified majority (or supermajoritarian) institution. We will see the difference this “detail”

makes in section IV.

2. Absolute majorities and abstentions. Sometimes, constitutional requirements specify an

absolute majority of the members of a Parliament. For example, the European Parliament has to

propose amendments by the absolute majority of its members in certain legislative procedures.

Similarly, the French National Assembly can vote a non-confidence vote only by the absolute

majority of its members. The German chancellor is invested (and replaced) by an absolute

majority of the members of the Bundestag. If all the members of a legislative body are present

and nobody abstains, then an absolute majority and a simple majority coincide. If, however, there

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are absentee members, or if certain members abstain from the vote, then, the absolute majority

requirement is equivalent with a qualified majority of the members who participate in the vote.

Consider that the percentage of abstentions and/or absentee votes is a, and of the

remainder the percentage of “yes” votes is y (and the remainder (1-y) is “no” votes). An absolute

majority requirement translates to y>(1/2)/(1-a). This relationship gives the following “qualified

majority threshold equivalents.” If 50% of MEPs are absentees or abstain, unanimity of votes is

required for an amendment to pass. If 33.3% do not vote or abstain, the required threshold is ¾;

if the percentage of non participants is 25%, a decision requires 2/3 of the present MEPs, etc.

Since the absolute majority requirement translates to a qualified majority equivalent threshold in

the European Parliament, this institution is sometimes unable to introduce amendments desirable

to an (absolute) majority of its members.

3. Unwilling or undesirable allies and simple majorities. In the French IV Republic

(1945-1958), in the height of the cold war, governments often made the statement that if the

Communist party voted in their favor they would not count the Communist votes. A statement of

that form is equivalent with taking a percentage of votes away from the “yes” column and

moving it to abstentions. Again, we are talking about qualified majority equivalence.

Alternatively, some parties may refuse to support any possible government. They are known in

the literature as “anti-system parties.” The mere existence of such parties transforms simple

majority requirements to qualified majorities. Think for example that a new party is added to the

five parties of a parliament (like the ones presented in Figure 2.4), and that all parties have the

same number of votes (16.67%). If the new party is an anti-system party, that is, a party is voting

“no” on every issue, then, in order to obtain a majority four out of the six parties are needed to

vote “yes.” Since party six is voting always no, then, the required majority is in fact 4/5 (four of

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the remaining five parties have to agree). Applying the reasoning I presented in Chapter 2 section

III, this qualified majority equivalence substantially decreases the winset of the status quo. In

fact, it may make any change of the status quo impossible.

Modeling some Latin American legislatures may require this technique of qualified

majority equivalence. The reason is that Latin American parties are more disciplined than US

parties, but less than European parties, and consequently, winning coalitions may exclude some

parties (that never support prevailing policies) but use different parties each time. In this case the

analyst has to exclude the parties that never participate in majorities and see how the remaining

parties form qualified majorities in order to produce the required votes.

Finally, as I said in Chapter 4 oversized governments in parliamentary systems may be

modeled as qualified majority equivalents, because all coalition members are not needed for a

particular policy to be adopted. Strom’s (2000) arguments discussed in Chapter 4 would lead to

such an approach. However, as the reader will verify from the empirical results of Chapter 7 I

did not need such an approach to model the effects of oversized coalitions on issues of workers’

time and working conditions.

To conclude, while qualified majorities per se are not a very frequent requirement,

knowledge of the political reality prevailing inside different institutions or political systems, may

lead the researcher to use qualified majority equivalents, and the analysis introduced in Chapter 2

section III to model particular institutions or political systems. Whenever qualified majorities

become the decision-making rule (whether de facto or de jure), policy stability should increase,

and outcomes should be expected to converge towards the center of the location of veto players.

IV. Bicameralism and qualified majorities combined.

What happens if bicameralism is combined with qualified majorities? That is, if one of

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the two chambers of a bicameral legislature decides by simple majority, but the other decides by

qualified majority? This is the case of the US institutions if we consider that the Senate has to

make important decisions by filibuster proof majorities (so that a 3/5 majority will use the

cloture rule and avoid filibusters). This is also the case of EU institutions, because the Council

decides by qualified majority or unanimity.

INSERT FIGURE 6.5

Figure 6.5 replicates Figure 6.2 with the only difference that decisions in the upper

chamber are taken by unanimity. There are two major consequences of these more stringent

requirements of decision-making in one of the two chambers as shown in Figure 6.5. First, policy

stability increases (since the winset of the status quo shrinks). Second, outcomes shift in favor of

the less flexible chamber (whether one considers the whole winset of the status quo or simply the

intersection with the core or the line connecting the centers of the two yolks (in the figure out of

all the points L*U* only one survives)). I will use these results to analyze decision-making in the

EU in Chapter 11.

If we restrict the above analysis in one dimension, then the core of the bicameral system

expands, and it is more difficult to upset the status quo. In particular points between U1’ (the

projection of U1 on the bicameral core) and U3 that could be modified under congruent

majorities, are now invulnerable under the new decision-making rule.

This is the essence of the argument that Keith Krehbiel (1998) presents in his influential

book Pivotal Politics.

Krehbiel at the theoretical level introduces a one dimensional model and

identifies the “pivots” of decision-making (the 40

and 60

Senator for filibuster and the 34

and 66

senator for veto override) and the size of the area included between the two pivots (the

See also David Jones (1998), (2001).

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“gridlock area”).

Empirically Krehbiel identifies changes in the “size of the gridlock area” by

using the size of the majorites in each chamber and calculating whether the support for the

president increases (in which case the gridlock area shrinks) or decreases (in which case gridlock

increases).

Krehbiel uses his model to reevaluate Mayhew’s findings. Mayhew had identified two

major variables accounting for legislative productivity: the first was the first half of a presidential

term (Mayhew 1991: 176-77), and the second “activist mood” which is an “elusive” in

Mayhew’s terms way of capturing the idea that “in lawmaking, nothing emerges more clearly

from a postwar analysis than that something special was going on from the early or mid-1960s

through the mid-1970s” (Mayhew 1991: 177). Introducing the size of the gridlock area in a series

of regressions Krehbiel (1998:70-71) is able to demonstrate that the statistical significance of

Mayhew’s variables disappears even if one considers alternative measures for these variables.

The contribution is significant, because as Krehbiel modestly claims, it moves the analysis “a

step beyond anecdotal support which is characteristic of much of the presidency theory”

(Krehbiel 1998:75).

Krehbiel’s results are completely consistent with the theory presented in this book, but I

want to introduce one important point of comparison. It is the dimensionality of the underlying

space. For Pivotal Politics the policy space is one dimensional. In fact, the very title of the book

and the definition of pivots implies a single policy dimension. In Krehbiel’s analysis “among the

n legislators… two players may have unique pivotal status due to supermajoritarian procedures.”

(Krehbiel 1998: 23).

INSERT FIGURE 6.6

For a similar one dimensional model taking into account committee positions see Smith (1989). For

multidimensional models see Shepsle (1979) and Shepsle and Weingast (1981), (1984), (1987).

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However, if one adds even a single policy dimension into the underlying model, the

pivots multiply. In Figure 6.6A I present the single dimensional argument, according to which

the pivots are always the same no matter where the status quo is and no matter where the

alternative proposal is. (see also Krehbiel 1998: 23). In Figure 6.6B I add a second dimension,

and consider only three voters A, B, and C. Depending on where the alternative proposal is, the

pivotal player may change (proposal PA makes voter A pivotal, proposal PB makes B pivotal,

while proposal PC makes C pivotal). One can increase the dimensions and the alternatives to the

status quo, and almost any one of a particular group of players will become “pivotal.” This

fundamental change from one to more than one dimensions is not an unusual feature of voting

models or of Krehbiel’s model. In fact, speaking about all spatial models Krehbiel (1988) has

argued: “Simply expanding the dimensionality of choice space from one to two has profoundly

destabilizing consequences.” It is a distinctive feature of veto player theory that its conclusions

hold in any number of dimensions and regardless of whether veto players are individual or

collective. The price I pay for this ability to generalize is that sometimes I have to restrict

proposals in the uncovered set, and my conclusions hold only approximately (Chapter 2).

Is it reasonable to expand the dimensionality of space? Theoretically the answer is a clear

“yes” because we cannot rely on one-dimensional models if their results do not generalize. But

even if theoretically this is the case, why not stick with a parsimonious model that works in one

dimension? After all Congress is a bicameral legislature, and as I have claimed in section II, the

bicameral core or in its absence the line connecting the centers of the yolks of the two chambers

is the dominant dimension of conflict. So, why not report everything to this dimension? Because

besides the positions of the different members of the legislature it is important to know the

positions of the president which are simply assumed in Krehbiel’s model. Indeed, as Krehbiel

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argues, he assumes that the position of the president “is exterior to the legislative pivots”

(Krehbiel 1998: 73) or more generally: “to shift probabilistically between designated intervals of

the policy space” (Krehbiel 1998: fn.27). If the president is not assumed, but his preferences are

included a one-dimensional model is not sufficient, because there is no reason to assume that his

position is on this dimension. Braeuninger (2001) demonstrates that when n groups negotiate the

underlying space is of n-1 dimensions, which would mean, in the American case (with 3 veto

players) a two dimensional analysis. Given that the models in veto player theory hold in any

number of dimensions, in the empirical chapters that follow I will undertake both single and

multiple dimension estimations (Chapters 7 and 8). What Krehbiel calls “the gridlock area” is

nothing but the core of the decision-making rule in multiple dimensions. In addition, in Chapter

11 I will examine another case of three institutional veto players (the EU) and produce

multidimensional models of the core of quite complicated procedures.

To summarize my argument, it is true that government in the US is not just united or

divided as several researchers have claimed, but it is also supermajoritarian because significant

legislation cannot pass without clearing filibuster obstacles in the Senate, and most of the time

the minority party controls the required 40 seats. This means that divided government is built-in

in US institutions not because of the requirement that all three veto players agree on a particular

change of the status quo, but because of the filibuster rule which essentially prevents partisan

legislation from passing the Senate. Krehbiel’s (1998) contribution was to point out the

significance of supermajoritatian procedures in order to understand American politics. I use the

term “supermajoritarian” instead of “pivotal” because the latter presupposes a single dimension,

that cannot be taken for granted. His empirical results are an important first step, but they have to

be replicated on the basis of multidimensional models.

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Conclusions

Federalism has been studied both in the Political Science and the Economics literature.

The expectation was that decentralization would lead to decisions more appropriate for the

people that they concerned. The empirical evidence does not corroborate this expectation.

I studied the institutions of federalism, and found out that two particular rules as well as

their combination are used most frequently in federal countries: bicameralism and qualified

majorities. Each one of these procedures as well as their combination increases the number of

veto players, and consequently increases policy stability. The expectation is that federalism will

not only increase policy stability but have the structural consequences associated with multiple

veto players: independence of bureaucracies and the judiciary, government instability, etc. It is of

course possible that federalism has independent consequences as well. For example, federalism

may increase the independence of the judiciary not only because the number of veto players

increases but also because judges are asked to adjudicate among different levels of government. I

will discuss such effects in the corresponding empirical chapters.

While both bicameral and qualified majority institutions increase the number of veto

players, there is a significant difference between the two: bicameral institutions work well only if

the underlying dimension of conflict is captured by the centers of the yolks of the two chambers;

qualified majorities are likely to preserve outcomes located centrally in the collective veto

player.

All four chapters in this part (II) covered phenomena central in comparative political

analysis: regime types, interactions between legislative and executive, referendums, federalism,

bicameralism, and qualified majorities. I re-examined the existing knowledge and sometimes

ended up in agreement with the literature (democracy and competition), sometimes in conflict

(government power is derivative of agenda setting power not equivalent to government

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duration), sometimes explained existing disagreements (role of agenda setting in different types

of referendums) and other times introduced a different angle of analysis (institutions of

federalism instead of fiscal federalism, government composition instead of party system

analysis). I will not review the findings here. Instead I will focus on different mechanisms to

increase or decrease the number or the distances of veto players examined in this second part.

In Part I of the book I considered the number and distances of veto players as given and

looked at the implications on policy stability. In Part II I studied different institutional

configurations and their effects on the constellation of veto players of a polity. While it is clear

that the policy positions of veto players affect policy stability either because of absorbtion (some

veto players do not affect policy outcomes) or because of the ideological distances of veto

players (if they converge policy stability decreases) there is one additional source of variation

that I have discussed in each chapter but I want to highlight as part of the conclusions. Specific

institutional provisions may not have always the same result on veto players. The same

institution may add or subtract veto players, or, it may keep their number the same but alter their

distances thereby affecting policy stability.

We made some of these points explicit in the chapters of this part. For example

referendums always add a veto player (the “as if” median voter), but depending on their agenda

setting rules they may eliminate existing ones. Indeed, when the same player controls both the

question and triggering of a referendum the existing veto players are eliminated. We showed that

in veto player referendums the position of the status quo ceases to be relevant, and the agenda

setter can obtain an outcome in the winset of the “as if” median voter. We also saw that in

popular initiative referendums the different potential agenda setting groups will concentrate on

attracting a majority of the public and ignore the existing veto players.

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Similar arguments can be made about bicameralism: the second chamber may or may not

have veto powers. For example, the German Bundesrat has veto powers over legislation that has

consequences on federalism, but not on other pieces. With respect to qualified majorities,

different issues may require different thresholds.

In presidential systems the President has usually the power to veto legislation, but most

of the times there are provisions for a veto override of the legislature. To the extend that such

provisions can be achieved, the veto override conditions reduce policy stability, since they

provide a mechanism that the status quo can be changed despite the objections of the president.

But the most complicated (from a veto player perspective) institutional provision is the

one of executive decrees. This institution usually subtracts veto players, but it can also add veto

players, or leave the number of veto players the same but alter their ideological distances. The

archetypal case of executive decrees would be a Presidential decree in a presidential system

(Carey***): the President bypasses the other veto players, and makes the final decision in an area

of his jurisdiction.

However, there are cases where government decrees add a veto player to the existing

ones: in France the President of the Republic is part of the government (in fact, presides over it),

so he has to agree on a government decree. With respect to ordinary legislation he has no veto so

he can be bypassed by the parties in government (assuming different presidential and

parliamentary majorities). We will discuss this point further in the empirical analysis of Chapter

Finally, government decrees may preserve the number of veto players, but alter their

distances. For example the Italian government often used executive decrees as a way of

bypassing parliament (Kreppel 1997). However, as we argued in Chapter 4 the parties members