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

Abstract

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.

Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik

“…Independent regulators are highly prone to capture, primarily because they are heavily lobbied by the producers who are the subjects of the regulation (Becker, 1983). Furthermore, constitutions with multiple checks-and-balances (or veto-points), as opposed to more majoritarian decision-making rules, allow concentrated (single-issue) interests to block policy outcomes that are in the interests of the majority -as has been the case in the US system of government, where the gun lobby has repeated blocked more restrictive gun control and private healthcare companies have repeatedly blocked provisions to introduce some form of universal health coverage, despite overwhelming public support for both these policies (Tsebelis, 1999(Tsebelis, , 2002.…”

Are consensus democracies more environmentally effective?

“…Furthermore, veto player theory (Tsebelis 1999) states that the number of significant laws produced by a coalition government is significantly lower than the number of laws produced by single-party governments or by coalitions with partners that agree (Tsebelis 1999, p. 3). One would thus expect to find more significant pieces of legislation in countries with fewer veto players (Tsebelis 1999, p. 6).…”

Institutionalized pollution havens

“…The political institution of particular interest in this paper is the number of legislative units (LUs) (or veto players). LUs are branches of government such as (dependent on the political system) the president, the prime minister, the chambers of parliament or congress, the government coalition parties or the majority party (see Tsebelis 1999Tsebelis , 2002Keefer and Stasavage 2003). 5 While the feedback effects of FDI on environmental regulations have received very little attention within the PHH literature, the impact of political institutions on these feedback effects has never previously been examined.…”