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Veto Players (veto + player)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

The Politics of Retrenchment: The Quandaries of Social Protection Under Military Rule in Chile, 1973,1990

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2001
Rossana Castiglioni
ABSTRACT Chile's military government replaced the country's universalistic social policy system with a set of market-oriented social policies. Taking evidence from three areas (pensions, education, and health care), this study seeks to explain why the military advanced a policy of deep retrenchment and why reform of health care was less thorough than it was in pensions and education. The radical transformation of policy relates to the breadth of power concentration enjoyed by General Pinochet and his economic team, the policymakers' ideological positions, and the role of veto players. The more limited reform of health care is linked to the actions of a powerful veto player, the professional association of physicians. [source]

Policy decisiveness and responses to speculative attacks in developed countries

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2009
KYUNG JOON HAN
Why are some countries able to defend their currencies when there are speculative attacks, while others fail to do so and devalue their currencies? This article suggests that intragovernment factors as well as government-legislature relations should be considered because many of the policy responses to speculative attacks do not require legislative acquiescence, so that intragovernment attributes will have more substantial effects on the policy responses than those of government-legislature relations. This article suggests that cleavages within government and its instability have a negative effect on decisiveness. Data regarding speculative attacks in developed countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Heckman selection model show that governments with many veto players and with less durability have had difficulty in defending their currencies in the face of speculative attacks. The article also finds that governmental institutional effects can be constrained by central bank independence. The effects become substantially smaller and statistically insignificant when central banks are very independent. The overall results imply that policy indecisiveness induced by some political factors makes governments less able to adopt a new policy equilibrium that is necessary to respond to an exogenous shock such as speculative attack. [source]

Constitutional courts as veto players: Divorce and decrees in Italy

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2001
MARY L. VOLCANSEK
This article argues that constitutional courts in Western European parliamentary systems should be integrated into discussions of how public policies are changed, rather than being viewed as an external veto point. It attempts to bridge a gap between a judicial politics literature that focuses on the micro,level of individual judges' votes and comparative scholarship that operates at the macro,level. A model for viewing constitutional courts as veto players, as a third institutional actor, is proposed and is then illustrated using the cases of legalizing divorce and blocking the executive reissuing decree laws in Italy. The model considers both the indirect and direct influences that constitutional courts can exert on the policy,making process. It also facilitates understanding and explaining the role of courts, as well as legislatures and executives, in conducting the interactions and bargaining that result in policy change. [source]

Understanding the Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2005
David Skidmore
How should we explain the recent unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy? Some accounts treat growing American unilateralism as a passing aberration attributable to the neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration. This paper, by contrast, traces U.S. unilateralism to the structural effects, at home and abroad, of the end of the Cold War. Internationally, the removal of the Soviet threat has undermined the "institutional bargain" that once guided relations between the U.S. and its major allies. Absent Cold War imperatives, the U.S. is less willing to provide collective goods through strong international institutions and other states are less likely to defer to U.S. demands for special privileges that exempt the U.S. from normal multilateral constraints. Domestically, the end of the Cold War has weakened the ability of presidents to resist the appeals of powerful veto players whose interests are threatened by multilateral commitments. These factors suggest that American unilateralism may have deeper roots and more staying power than many expect. [source]

The Politics of Retrenchment: The Quandaries of Social Protection Under Military Rule in Chile, 1973,1990

Marching at the Pace of the Slowest: a Model of International Climate-Change Negotiations

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2001
Hugh Ward
We model international negotiations on climate change. Leaders such as the European Union and the US can make proposals and influence veto players, including other countries and domestic lobbies, who must choose whether to accept or reject proposals. We explain why policy change has been minimal in this issue area, which veto-players receive the greatest and least attention and why leader actors wishing to see less progress are in such a strong bargaining position [source]