George Tsebelis

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

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.

Legislative Politics in the European Union

This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987, whereas they have lessened the legislative influence of the Commission. Under the Amsterdam treatys version of the codecision procedure, the Parliament is a coequal legislator with the Council, whereas the Commissions influence is likely to be more informal than formal. Second, as long as the Parliament acts as a pro-integration entrepreneur, policy outcomes under consultation, cooperation and the new codecision will be more integrationist than the QMV-pivot in the Council prefers. Third, the pace of European integration may slow down if MEPs become more responsive to the demands of their constituents. Fourth, the EU is evolving into a bicameral legislature with a heavy status quo bias. Not only does the Council use QMV but absolute majority voting requirements and high levels of absenteeism create a de facto supermajority threshold for Parliamentary decisions. Finally, if the differences between the Council and the Parliament concern regulation issues on a traditional left-right axis, the Commission is more likely to be the ally of the Council than the Parliament.

An institutional critique of intergovernmentalism

Most intergovernmentalist analyses of European integration focus on treaty bargaining among European Union member governments. Recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis, an approach that asserts that a governments ability to influence policy is a function of all possible coalitions in the Council of Ministers to which it is pivotal. This approach suffers from two major weaknesses. First, it fails to take into account the policy preferences of governments; it overestimates the influence of governments holding extreme preferences and underestimates that of more centrist governments. Second, power index analysis fails to consider the important roles of the Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament in legislative processes. Todays procedures affect the mix of agenda-setting and veto power, and this has systematic effects on policy outcomes. If intergovernmentalism is to explain choices made during treaty rounds, it must take into account these legislative dynamics.

The Institutional Foundations of Intergovernmentalism and Supranationalism in the European Union

We present a unified model of the politics of the European Union (EU). We focus on the effects of the EUs changing treaty base (from the Rome to Amsterdam Treaties) on the relations among its three supranational institutions—the Commission of the European Communities, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament—and between these actors and the intergovernmental Council of Ministers. We analyze these institutional interactions in terms of the interrelationships among the three core functions of the modern state: to legislate and formulate policy (legislative branch), to administer and implement policy (executive branch), and to interpret policy and adjudicate disputes (judicial branch). Our analysis demonstrates that the evolution of the EUs political system has not always been linear. For example, we explain why the Courts influence was greatest before the passage of the Single European Act and declined in the following decade, and why we expect it to increase again in the aftermath of the Amsterdam Treaty. We also explain why the Commission became a powerful legislative agenda setter after the Single European Act and why its power today stems more from administrative discretion than from influence over legislation.

Veto Players and Institutional Analysis

The veto players theory can be used to analyze all political systems regardless of regime (presidential or parliamentary), party system (one-, two-, or multiparty), and type of parliament (unicameral or multicameral). This paper develops the veto players theory to account for a series of important political phenomena: the difference between majoritarian and supermajoritarian institutions; the importance of absenteeism, or of political marginalization; the importance of agenda control and referendums; the reasons for government stability (parliamentary systems) and regime stability (presidential systems); the reasons for independence of bureaucracies, and judicial independence. All these phenomena are analyzed in a coherent way, on the basis of the same framework. Empirical evidence from existing literature corroborating the theory is provided.

Coalition Formation in the European Parliament

This article analyzes coalition formation within the European Parliament (EP) under the cooperation procedure through the analysis of a random sample of 100 roll call votes. The authors find that generally, coalitions form on the basis of ideology, not nationality, although they are able to identify some national groups that occasionally vote against the majority of their party group. More interestingly, they find that the political initiative within the EP belongs to the Left and that the majorities required at different stages affect not only the outcomes of votes but also the coalitions that will form. Finally, a slight variation is found in coalition building depending on the subject matter. On the basis of these findings, the authors suggest an alternative interpretation of the conflicts between the Council and EP based on an ideological conflict about more (EP) or less (Council) regulation, as opposed to more or less integration.

THE ABUSE OF PROBABILITY IN POLITICAL ANALYSIS: THE ROBINSON CRUSOE FALLACY

The decision to stay at home when you have no umbrella and rain is probable is an appropriate problem for decision theory. The decision to speed when you are in a hurry and the police might be patrolling is a game against a rational opponent. Treating the latter like a problem for decision theory is what I call the Robinson Crusoe fallacy. It is quite common and leads to incorrect conclusions. If the game has no pure strategy equilibrium, changes in the payoffs to a player affect not that players strategy but the strategy of the opponent in equilibrium. For example, modifying the size of the penalty does not affect the frequency of crime commitment at equilibrium, but rather the frequency of law enforcement. I provide examples of this fallacy in regulation, international economic sanctions, and organization theory and argue that it stems from inappropriate use of the concept of probability.

Why Resist the Temptation to Apply Power Indices to the European Union

The temptation to apply power indices to decision-making in the European Union should be resisted for two reasons. First, power index approaches either ignore the policy preferences of relevant actors in the EU or incorporate them in ways that generate unstable and misleading results. Second, no matter how sophisticated, power indices cannot take into account the strategic properties of the procedures that govern Europes legislative processes, especially concerning changes in the institutional location of agenda-setting power. Proponents have responded to our criticisms of earlier power index research with ingenious efforts to include functional substitutes for institutions and preferences. The problems with power indices, however, are congenital and cannot be adequately addressed without moving to a non-cooperative game theoretic framework.

Legislative Procedures in the European Union: An Empirical Analysis

The article analyses the role of the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council in the two main legislative procedures in the European Union: co-operation and co-decision (I). We use the legislative history of some 5,000 parliamentary amendments. These procedures have been the subject of a great deal of theoretical debate. According to conventional wisdom the co-decision procedure increases the powers of the European Parliament. Revisionist approaches, however, suggest that the conditional agenda-setting powers accorded to the Parliament by the co-operation procedure are more important than the veto powers ascribed by co-decision.

Are Sanctions Effective?: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

Although economic sanctions have been quite frequent in the twentieth century, a close examination of the low success rate (33 out of 83 cases) indicates that sender countries are not able to select the appropriate cases. Moreover, analysts sometimes offer contradictory advice for such selection. This article provides a game-theoretic explanation of these phenomena. Six different game-theoretic scenarios lead to the same equilibrium outcome. This is a mixed strategy equilibrium. The success ratio is the outcome of the selection of mixed strategies by both sender and receiver countries. Under a wide range of (specified) circumstances, the size of the sanction has no impact upon the behavior of the target country. Finally, some empirical implications of the game-theoretic analysis are compared to existing empirical generalizations, and further implications for empirical research are discussed.