Tsebelis G. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work
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The independent variables for both chapters describing the over time constellation of veto
players in different countries can be found at: http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/tsebelis/. The findings
that these two chapters produce are congruent. Policy stability increases as a function of the
number of veto players increases, or, more precisely as the range of a government coalition (the
size of the unanimity core in a single dimension, and some different but equivalent measure in
multiple dimensions) increases. Policy stability decreases as the alternation (ideological distance)
of each coalition to its predecessor increases. So, the argument made in this section is that policy
stability, whether measured in outcomes or in policies, depends on veto players the way Part I
specified.
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CHAPTER 7: LEGISLATION
The theory I presented in this book predicts that policy stability (defined as the
impossibility of significant change of the status quo) will be the result of many veto players,
particularly if they have significant ideological differences among them. This chapter aims at
making a direct and cross-national test of production of significant laws as a function the number
and the ideological distances of veto players. I will test these predictions using a new dataset of
“significant laws” on issues of “working time and working conditions.”
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Working time and working conditions is a legislative dimension highly correlated with
the Left-Right dimension that predominates party systems across Europe. Consequently, we can
find the ideological positions of different parties on the Left-Right dimension and use them as
proxies of the ideological positions of parties with respect to working time and working
conditions. According to this approach, given that all parties are located along the same
dimension, one can identify the two most extreme parties of a coalition, and all the others will be
“absorbed” since they are located inside the core of the most extreme ones (Proposition 1.2). The
result of this analysis is that the ideological distance of the two most extreme parties in a
government coalition, as we will say from now on the range of this coalition, will be our
independent variable. The number of significant laws will be a declining function of range. In
addition, the number of significant laws will be an increasing function of the distance between
the current government and the previous one, as we will say from now on alternation. The reason
is because each government will try to modify the policies that it disagrees with and the larger
the distance between the two governments, the larger the distance between the current veto
players and the status quo is likely to be. Also, the longer a government stays in power, the more
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I thank H. Doering for providing me with this dataset.
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likely it is to produce significant legislation in the area under consideration (Tsebelis (1995a:
105)). Finally, as I explained in Figure 1.8 the variance of the number of significant laws will be
higher when the range of a coalition is small and lower when the range large.
The chapter is organized into three sections. The first presents the dataset that combines
information about significant laws in different West European countries with data about
government coalitions (composition of governments and ideological positions of parties on a
left-right scale). In this part, I explain how the different variables used in this study are
generated. The second part presents the results with governments being the unit of analysis and
shows that the expectations of the model are corroborated. The third part uses countries as the
unit of analysis and points out the inverse relationship between significant legislation and overall
pieces of legislation that are produced in a country.
I. THE DATA
In order to test whether the number and ideological distance of veto players affects the
production of significant laws I created a dataset by merging data on significant legislation (laws
and decrees) on “working time and working conditions” in fifteen countries of Western Europe
for the period 1981-1991 with data on coalition governments for the same countries and the same
period.
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In this section, I will explain what was included in the original datasets as well as the
additional manipulations for the construction of specific variables.
1. Significant legislation. Doering and his team identified the number of significant laws
for all Western European countries in the area of labor legislation (legislation on “working time
and working conditions”) for the period 1981-1991. For that purpose they used the computerized
database NATLEX that has been compiled by the International Labor Organization (ILO),
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I received the data on significant legislation from Herbert Doering, and the data on government coalitions from
Paul Warwick.
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located in Geneva. While this database started being collected at the beginning of the 1970s, the
dataset became complete only since the beginning of the 1980s. Consequently, the beginning of
the dataset that I analyze is January 1, 1981. This dataset has been indexed by subject matter, so
that one can identify all laws put to a vote and all decrees issued on any specific topic in all
European countries. While this database is of excellent use in identifying any subject in labor
legislation and has been used by Doering and his team to generate reliable numbers of pieces of
legislation in different areas, it provides no indication of “significant” legislation, the dependent
variable for a test of the veto players theory.
The next step would have been to identify some proxy for importance. Such a proxy
should not be size or length of legislation because a law can be written to enumerate areas of
applicability (in which case length is correlated with significance) or areas of exception (in
which case length is negatively correlated with significance). The alternative proxies that come
to mind are: the size of the budget needed for implementation, or the number of people affected
by its enactment. Both criteria would indicate that a bill on euthanasia or on same-sex marriage
would not be significant. This short discussion indicates that criteria for selection of “significant”
laws have an important ingredient of subjectivity that can undermine the results of any analysis
for a reader who does not share the same criteria for selection.
In the face of this problem, Doering had the brilliant idea of using the Encyclopedia of
Labor Law to generate the variable “significant laws.” The encyclopedia is edited by Roger
Blanpain and was written for labor lawyers originating in one European country who wanted to
practice law in another. According to the introduction, “National Legislation intends to make
available to the subscribers and users of the Encyclopedia pertinent provisions of the most
important acts of Parliament, governmental decrees, national, and interindustry wide major
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collective agreements, or other legal sources, where they cover a country as a whole . . .”
(Blanpain Suppl. 194 (July 1997): subsection 5; emphasis in the original). Each country is
covered by a 150- to 250-page monograph authored by a law professor or a judge and explaining
to readers the significant legislation in the area. The monographs have a common pattern that
facilitates subject matter identification. Norway and Iceland are not covered by the
Encyclopedia. Laws that were in the intersection of both sources (NATLEX and Encyclopedia)
are considered “significant,” while laws existing only in the NATLEX database were considered
non-significant.
Blanpain’s Encyclopedia provided a validation test for the NATLEX database, since for
the 1981-91 period, all the laws mentioned in Blanpain were included in NATLEX. This was not
true for the period before 1981, which, in turn, validates the cutoff point for the study.
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The
dates of promulgation of the significant laws of each country were compared with the dates that
governments were in power, so that laws were attributed to the governments that sponsored
them.
2. Governments. The dataset on governments included the dates of beginning and end of
governments in the 16 countries of the study (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland
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, and UK). The dates of beginning and end of the study (January 1, 1981, and
December 31, 1991) were considered the dates of beginning or end of the government in office
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These choices are described in more detail, along with legal questions that arise when a law is inadequately or
insufficiently described in Blanpain, in an essay co-authored by the Georgios Trantas, the lawyer who following
Doering’s idea actually identified the intersection of Blanpain and NATLEX (Scholtz and Trantas 1995).
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This chapter follows closely Tsebelis (1999). One of the important differences is that I have now included
Switzerland. The addition is important because Switzerland is the only one of these countries that is not a
parliamentary system, and consequently its inclusion with no substantive difference in results makes the veto players
argument more credible.
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at that date.
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On the basis of these dates of beginning and end of different governments, I
calculated the duration in years of each one of them.
The dataset on governments used conventional methods to account for beginning and
end of governments. Warwick (1994: 27) is explicit about what constitutes beginning: “A
government typically begins when it is appointed by a head of state.” As for ending, he adopts
the criteria proposed by Browne, Gleiber, and Mashoba (1984:7).
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However, the variable that
matters for the veto players’ theory is the partisan composition of government. Therefore, two
successive governments with identical composition should be counted as a single government,
even if they are separated by an election, which changes the size of the different parties in
parliament.
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The reason is that the variable that enters into a veto players’ analysis is not the
relative strength of different parties in government or parliament, but the fact that each one of
them needs to agree in order for legislation to pass.
In order to operationalize the above argument, I created a dataset of “merged”
governments, in which successive governments with the same composition were considered a
single government regardless of whether they were separated by a resignation and/or an election.
Obviously, merging affects the values of duration and the number of laws produced by a
government. To account for this change, I added the number of laws produced by different
governments to be merged and credited the resulting government with this total number of laws.
Duration was recalculated as the sum of the duration of consecutive governments (this excludes
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As a result the governments of each country at the beginning and ending of the period have been truncated (they
lasted longer than indicated, and may have produced legislation outside the period of this study).
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According to Browne et. al. “A government is considered terminated whenever: (1) parliamentary elections are
held, (2) the head of government changes, (3) the party composition of the government changes, or (4) the
government tenders its resignation, which is accepted by the head of state” (Warwick (1994: 28). On this fourth
point Warwick presents a variation and counts as termination even resignations that are not subsequently accepted
by the head of state.
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For a similar argument concerning Italian governments that succeed each other while the party (and sometimes
the person) composition is the same, see Di Palma (1977: 31).
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possible caretaker governments and periods when a resigned government waits to be replaced
that would have been included if I recalculated on the basis of the new beginning and ending
dates). As a result of merging, the number of cases in the dataset decreased to 59.
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The difference between the merged government dataset used in this study and the
traditional method of counting governments, becomes clear in the following two cases. First, in
Greece, the Socialist government (PASOK) came into power in 1981 and, according to the
dataset, it produced four significant laws in the area of “working time and working conditions.”
In 1985, the Socialists were reelected and the new government produced two additional
significant laws. According to the merged government dataset, the two PASOK governments are
counted as one that did not complete its legislative program in the first period and continued
changing the legislative framework of the right wing governments of 1974-1981 during its
second term.
The second example is drawn from France. After Francois Mitterrand was elected
President of the Republic in 1981, he appointed Pierre Maurois as the Prime Minister of a
coalition government that included the Socialists and the Communists. That government
produced four significant laws in the area under study. In 1983, a second Maurois government
with the same party composition replaced the existing Maurois government. This second
government stayed in power for one year, until the Communists dropped out of the coalition
because of the austerity policies that Mitterrand was about to impose in order to remain in the
European monetary system. The second Maurois government did not produce any new laws on
“working time and working conditions.” In my dataset, the two governments count as one: in a
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It would have been 58, but I count the French government twice during the cohabitation period of 1986-88: I
consider only the two participating parties as veto players with respect to legislation, but I add the President when I
consider a government decree that they issued. This produces a conservative estimate because I omit all the times
that a cohabitation government produced 0 decrees as a result of its ideological divisions.
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three-year period the Socialist-Communist coalition produced four significant laws. Implicit in
my account is that the second Maurois government did not produce any laws because the first
had completed its work in this area.
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3.Ideology. The government dataset included also the composition of different
governments (the parties participating in government coalitions to which I added the positions of
the President of Portugal and France and the Bundesrat in Germany in the cases indicated in the
first part of this article) and their “ideological scores” on the basis of three indices. The first was
from Paul Warwick’s (1994) Government Survival in Western European Parliamentary
Democracies (Warwick expanded the dataset collected by Browne et.al. 1984, who had
expanded the dataset collected by Dodd 1976). This index was generated from forty different
measures that were developed from experts, party manifestos, and survey sources. Of the
governments included in this dataset, the index ranged from a low of -6 (left) to a high of 5
(right).
The second index was provided by Castles and Mair (1984) in “Left-Right Political
Scales: Some ‘Expert’ Judgments.” These ideological scores were generated from a
questionnaire survey of more than 115 political scientists from Western Europe and the United
States (Castles and Mair 1984: 75). The questionnaire asked each respondent to place all of the
parties holding seats in his/her national legislature on the left-right political spectrum ranging
from zero (ultra-left) to 10 (ultra-right), with 2.5 representing the moderate left, 5 the center, and
7.5 the moderate right. Castles and Mair present the results from those countries that had at least
three respondents. The ideological score reported for each party was the average of available
responses. Given the ten-point scale, the potential range of responses was (0,10). Of the parties
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All the calculations in this article were replicated with the traditional way of counting governments, and led to the
same qualitative results.
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analyzed here, however, the low score was 1.4, received by the Communist Party of France, and
the high was 8.2, received by the Gaullist party.
The third index was drawn from Laver and Hunt’s (1992) first dimension variable,
“increase services vs. cut taxes.” Respondents were professional political scientists (Laver and
Hunt 1992: 38-41, 122). Each respondent was asked to locate the policy positions of both the
party leaders and voters for each party in his/her country on the left-right spectrum. In addition to
the parties that won seats in the most recent election, respondents were asked to evaluate every
party that won at least 1 percent of the national vote, as well as any significant regional parties.
The scale adopted by Laver and Hunt was a 20-point scale (to accommodate for the fact that the
countries included in their study contained up to 14 parties to be placed on the scale). For the
first dimension -- taxes vs. public services, respondents assigned each party a score ranging from
1 (“promote raising taxes to increase public services”) to 20 (“promote cutting public services to
cut taxes”). Among the cases included in the dataset, the Laver Hunt (first dimension) variable
ranged from a low of 2.1 to a high of 17.4.
Switzerland was not included in any of the datasets. It has had a government including
the four major parties (socialist, liberal, Christian democrat, and farmers party) throughout the
period under study. I used the data generated for a similar government in Finland (four veto
players including the Social Democratic Party, the Rural and Agrarian parties, and the People’s
party) for the missing data on Switzerland. On the basis of Sani and Sartori’s (1983) data
reported in Laver and Schofield (1990: 255, 265) the Swiss government had a range of 3.4
(=(7.1-4.7) in their scale) while the Finnish larger
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than 2.4 (=(6.3-3.9)).
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Sani and Sartori do not report the position of all parties included in the Finnish government, so I could not make
the exact calculation.
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Laver and Hunt included the remaining 15 countries in their study. Warwick did not code
the parties of France V, and Greece. In addition, some government parties in Ireland, Italy,
Spain, and Sweden were not scored. Castles and Mair did not include Luxembourg, Portugal, and
Greece.
On the basis of each one of these measures of ideology, I was able to construct new
variables representing the “range” of each government according to the index, as well as the
“alternation” from one government to the next. The range variable was created by taking the
absolute value of the distance between the most extreme parties of a coalition. These two parties
were usually (but not always) the same for different indices. However, the correlations among
the range variables calculated on the basis of the cases covered by all three indices were quite
high.
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The alternation variable was calculated by finding the mid-range position of each
government, and taking the difference between two successive governments.
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Because this
measure was calculated using the previous government, I needed information on the government
preceding the one that was in power in 1981. Again, the three different indices produced highly
correlated values of alternation for the cases covered by all three indices.
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4. The new “range” and “alternation” variables. These three range and alternation
variables covered different countries, and were calculated on the basis of different questions that
were relevant to the left-right division. In order to preserve the size of my dataset, as well as use
all the available information, I constructed new measures of range and alternation, based on the
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The correlations between any two of these indexes were above .8.
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The formula I used was the following: (maxgovt1+mingovt1) - (maxgovt2+mingovt2), where max- and min-
govt1 are the ideological scores of the preceding government, and max- and min-govt2 are the ideological scores of
the “current” government. For instance, if a government succeeded (or “replaced”) a government with the same
party structure, then all of the alternation variables would equal zero.
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The correlations between any two of these indexes were also above .8