The Building and Breaking of Peace

This chapter explores the role businesses play in creating peaceful societies. It builds on the rational choice theory of civil war onset and termination and draws from business research to understand the role private firms play in preventing civil wars. Firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, and proactive firms can significantly increase a country’s peace years. At the same time, an active private sector can make it significantly harder to reach an agreement for states with active conflict, as they act as an additional veto player in the bargaining process. This chapter tests these arguments on original cross-national data. The findings emphasize the need for political scientists to examine further the role of the private sector in many of the topics they study and generate a more complete picture of conflict and its resolution.

Not So Much Societal: The Catholic Church in Poland as a Veto Player

George Tsebelis distinguished two forms of veto players’ actions: institutional and partisan. In a democracy, the Church is not able to play either role because it is not an element of the state’s institutional structure. This was the source for Simon Fink’s proposal to look at the Church as a societal veto player (VP). The case of Poland shows, however, that such an approach becomes inadequate in numerous situations. The Church’s influence on political parties, and particularly the state’s institutions, may be exerted outside society. Performed on the basis of the existing literature and political debates conducted since 1989, the analysis of the social and political reality of Poland allows us to indicate the following four issues with respect to which the role of the Church as a VP The Church acted most often as a quasi-institutional VP (five cases), and once as a quasi-partisan VP. It never took actions based primarily on mobilizing society. This undermines the universality of findings and indicates the necessity of reconsidering the role of churches as societal veto players.

Liberal Leaders and Liberal Success: The Impact of Alternation

A leader from Quebec boosts the fortunes of the Liberal party in that province. This, in turn, has helped make Quebec the veto player in twentieth-century Canadian elections and the Liberals the “natural” governing party. Although Quebec is no longer as critical as before, a leader from the province still makes a big difference. Full impact from the pattern requires more than one election to unfold. Patterns outside Quebec are similar, if fainter: the Liberal party is not punished for choosing a Quebecker and may even be helped. The early success of the pattern moved the Liberals to alternate between Quebec and non-Quebec leaders, such that the party is now led by a Quebecker more often than not. Maintaining alternation has never been easy and is only getting harder.

Government Responsiveness under Majoritarian and (within) Proportional Electoral Systems

Government responsiveness to citizens’ preferences is considered a sign of a well-functioning representative democracy. While the empirical literature has grown significantly, scholars have given less scrutiny to the conceptualization of government responsiveness and its relationship to policy/ideological congruence. We show that government responsiveness represents dynamic changes from governments in order to improve policy/ideological congruence. In addition, we consider how electoral systems influence governments’ incentives to be responsive as well as their capacity to be responsive. Building on a veto player approach, we argue that government responsiveness decreases as the number of parties in cabinet increases. We examine government responsiveness to citizens’ ideological preferences in 16 advanced democracies in 1980–2016 with respect to social spending. In line with our veto player framework, we show, first, that governments are generally more responsive under majoritarian than PR electoral systems and, second, that government responsiveness decreases under PR electoral systems as the number of parties increases in cabinet.

Policy Gridlock versus Policy Shift in Gun Politics: A Comparative Veto Player Analysis of Gun Control Policies in the United States and Canada

Why do major events of gun violence (i.e., mass shootings) lead to incremental change or no federal legislative change at all in the United States while major events of gun violence have resulted in large-scale legislative changes in Canada? Exploring the complexities involved in this compelling question, this article conducts a comparative analysis of recent gun control policy gridlock and shift in these two countries. We concentrate on two mass shooting cases in each country: the Columbine (1990) and Sandy Hook (2012) massacres in the United States and the École Polytechnique Massacre (1989) and Concordia Shooting (1992) in Canada. We use veto player theory to gain insights into why tightening gun policy is so difficult to implement in the United States while Canada often follows up with policy transformations after a focusing event. This theory informs the central argument that the key factors underpinning the divergent policy outcomes on gun control issues in both countries involve differences in the structure of government/institutional design and the role and power of interest groups in each case.

External Territorial Threats and Military Regimes

This study argues that sustained threats to homeland territory create an environment conducive to the presence of military regimes. Territorial threats lead to increased levels of militarization and make the military internally unified and cohesive. These developments enhance the military’s capacity for intervening in politics where a strong and autonomous military serves as an institutionalized veto player. Accordingly, collegial military regimes, characterized by a group of high-ranking officers and distinct from military strongman rule in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single military leader, are likely to exist in environments rife with territorial threats. Supporting my argument, I find that a country is more likely to experience collegial military rule when it engages in rivalries or claims over territorial issues.