Measuring Policy Positions of Veto Players in Parliamentary Democracies

2010 ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas König ◽  
Bernd Luig ◽  
Sven-Oliver Proksch ◽  
Jonathan B. Slapin
Keyword(s):  
Veto Players ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies

scholarly journals Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism and Multipartyism

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Tsebelis
Keyword(s):  
Policy Change ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Veto Players ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Veto Player ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
Presidential Systems

The article compares different political systems with respect to one property: their capacity to produce policy change. I define the basic concept of the article, the ‘veto player’: veto players are individual or collective actors whose agreement (by majority rule for collective actors) is required for a change of the status quo. Two categories of veto players are identified in the article: institutional and partisan. Institutional veto players (president, chambers) exist in presidential systems while partisan veto players (parties) exist at least in parliamentary systems. Westminster systems, dominant party systems and single-party minority governments have only one veto player, while coalitions in parliamentary systems, presidential or federal systems have multiple veto players. The potential for policy change decreases with the number of veto players, the lack of congruence (dissimilarity of policy positions among veto players) and the cohesion (similarity of policy positions among the constituent units of each veto player) of these players. The veto player framework produces results different from existing theories in comparative politics, but congruent with existing empirical studies. In addition, it permits comparisons across different political and party systems. Finally, the veto player framework enables predictions about government instability (in parliamentary systems) or regime instability (in presidential systems); these predictions are supported by available evidence.

Agree or disagree

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Change ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
Leadership Changes ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The One ◽  
Party Policy Positions

Political party leaders are among the most influential actors in parliamentary democracies, and a change in party leadership is an important event for a party organization. Yet, we do not know how these leadership changes affect voter perceptions about party policy positions. On the one hand, we may expect party leadership changes to renew attention to the party, educate voters about its policy positions, and hence reduce disagreement among voters about party positions. On the other hand, rival parties may use a leadership change as an opportunity to defame the party, its leadership, and policies, and hence, increase voter confusion about the party’s policies. Using data from seven Western European democracies, I show that leadership changes help parties reduce voter disagreement about party policy positions. This effect is stronger if the new leader shifts the party’s policy positions.

Veto Players and Law Production in Parliamentary Democracies: An Empirical Analysis

1999 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Tsebelis
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Veto Players ◽  
International Labour Organization ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
International Encyclopedia ◽  
Fundamental Insight ◽  
Number Of Parties

This article investigates hypotheses generated by the veto players' theory. The fundamental insight of this theory is that an increase in the number of veto players (for all practical purposes, in parliamentary systems the number of parties in government) and their ideological distance from one another will reduce the ability of both government and parliament to produce significant laws. In addition, the number of significant laws increases with the duration of a government and with an increase in the ideological difference between current and previous government. These propositions are tested with legislative data (both laws and government decrees) on working time and working conditions identified in two legislative sources: the NATLEX computerized database in Geneva (produced by the International Labour organization) and Blanpain's International Encyclopedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations. The data cover fifteen West European countries for the period 1981–91. The evidence corroborates the proposed hypotheses.

Legislative Review and Party Differentiation in Coalition Governments

2018 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 242-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID FORTUNATO
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
External Support ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Coalition Governments ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Legislative Proposals ◽  
Seeking Behavior ◽  
Legislative Review

Multiparty governance requires compromise and this compromise can lead to electoral losses. I argue that coalition members are motivated to differentiate themselves from their cabinet partners to mitigate potential electoral losses resulting from voters perceiving them as not rigorously pursuing their core policy positions or not possessing strong policy stands. I test this argument with original data on the scrutiny of over 2,200 government bills gathered from three parliamentary democracies incorporating information on voter perceptions of partisan ideology and parties’ policy preferences as derived from their manifestos. I find that coalition partners that are perceived as more similar will amend one another’s legislative proposals more vigorously in an effort to differentiate in the eyes of the electorate—to protect their brand—and therefore provide evidence for “pure” vote-seeking behavior in the legislative review process. Furthermore, these original data provide answers to several open questions regarding the policy motivations of cabinet parties in legislative review and the role of committee chairs and external support parties on policy outcomes.

scholarly journals Issue Salience and Candidate Position Taking in Parliamentary Parties

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Tromborg
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
District Level ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Mass Survey ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Voter Preferences ◽  
Candidate Position ◽  
The Way

Research on parliamentary representation has traditionally assumed that political parties take clear and differentiated policy positions, but recent studies suggest that parties sometimes have an electoral incentive to present voters with a distribution of positions to select from at the ballot box. This article explores whether parliamentary parties pursue such a strategy through candidate position taking using unique elite and mass survey data from Denmark. The results illustrate that parties are highly unified on issues that are salient to their electoral brand, but that they develop a distribution of positions that is related to voter preferences at the district level on less salient issues. These findings have important implications for the way that representation works in parliamentary democracies.

Coalition theory: a veto players’ approach

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Tsebelis ◽  
Eunyoung Ha
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Formation ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Policy Position ◽  
Veto Players ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Conditional Effects ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
One Step ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Empirical Tests

Coalition theories have produced arguments about the importance of party positions for participation in government coalitions, but have not connected the existing government institutions (in particular agenda setting) with the coalition government that will be formed. This article presents a veto players’ approach to coalition formation, which pushes the logic of non-cooperative game-theoretic models one step further: we argue that policy positions play a significant role in coalition formation because governments in parliamentary systems control the agenda of the policymaking process. As a result, the institutions that regulate this policymaking process affect coalition formation. In particular, positional advantages that a government may have (central policy position offormateur, fewer parties, and small policy distances among coalition partners) will become more necessary as a government has fewer institutional agenda setting advantages at its disposal. The empirical tests presented in this paper corroborate these expectations by explicitly accounting for the conditional effects of policy positions and institutional agenda setting rules on one another in a set of multilevel logit models.

Zasada podziału władzy a koncepcja veto players

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (158) ◽  
pp. 45-76
Author(s):  
Rafał Glajcar
Keyword(s):  
Veto Players

The Acceptance of Party Unity in Parliamentary Democracies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Willumsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Survey Questions ◽  
Ideal Policy ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Policy Incentives

The central argument of this book is that voting unity in European legislatures is not primarily the result of the ‘disciplining’ power of the leadership of parliamentary parties, but rather the result of a combination of ideological homogeneity through self-selection into political parties and the calculations of individual legislators about their own long-term benefits. Despite the central role of policy preferences in the subsequent behaviour of legislators, preferences at the level of the individual legislator have been almost entirely neglected in the study of parliaments and legislative behaviour. The book measures these using an until now under-utilized resource: parliamentary surveys. Building on these, the book develops measures of policy incentives of legislators to dissent from their parliamentary parties, and show that preference similarity amongst legislators explains a very substantial proportion of party unity, yet alone cannot explain all of it. Analysing the attitudes of legislators to the demands of party unity, and what drives these attitudes, the book argues that what explains the observed unity (beyond what preference similarity would explain) is the conscious acceptance by MPs that the long-term benefits of belonging to a united party (such as increased influence on legislation, lower transaction costs, and better chances of gaining office) outweigh the short-terms benefits of always voting for their ideal policy outcome. The book buttresses this argument through the analysis of both open-ended survey questions as well as survey questions on the costs and benefits of belonging to a political party in a legislature.

Political Cleavages and Political Parties

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
New Left ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Policy Choices

This chapter uses the cleavage positions of Candidates to the European Parliament (CEPs) to as representative of their parties’ political positions. Three surveys of CEPs track the evolution of party supply in European party systems. In 1979 parties were primarily aligned along a Left–Right economic cleavage. Gradually new left and Green parties began to compete in elections and crystallized and represented liberal cultural policies. In recent decades new far-right parties arose to represent culturally conservative positions. The cross-cutting cultural cleavage has also prompted many of the established parties to alter their policy positions. In most multiparty systems, political parties now compete in a fully populated two-dimensional space. This increases the supply of policy choices for the voters. The analyses are based on the Candidates to the European Parliament Studies in 1979, 1994, and 2009.

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