Veto Players, Agenda Control and Cabinet Stability in 17 European Parliaments, 1945–1999

Thomas Saalfeld ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Saalfeld: University of Bamberg

Chapter Chapter 6 in Reform Processes and Policy Change, 2011, pp 125-143 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract European democracies have experienced significant cross-national and diachronic variations in cabinet duration. Empirically, this chapter seeks to offer some new insights into the institutional sources of such variations, especially with regard to partisan veto players and the role of government agenda powers. The main theoretical interest of this chapter is the extent to which, and in what way, veto player theory helps us to understand the dynamics of coalition politics. George Tsebelis’ veto player theory has not been employed comprehensively to explain variations in cabinet duration. Nevertheless, he himself suggests that core elements of veto player theory, combined with important features of governmental agenda powers vis-à-vis parliaments, might produce a parsimonious, innovative, theoretically consistent and empirically testable model of cabinet durability (including an innovative theoretical conceptualization of exogenous shocks). This chapter is predominantly empirical in character. The main body of the chapter derives five hypotheses from veto player theory, tests them using data from the Constitutional Change in Parliamentary Democracy (CCPD) dataset and finds strong evidence for the importance of the number of veto players as a crucial explanatory variable of cabinet survival (rather than the ideological distance between veto players). It also finds substantial evidence for the importance of agenda powers for the survival of minority cabinets.

Keywords: Exogenous Shock; Veto Player; Minority Government; Seat Share; Positional Advantage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-1-4419-5809-9_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781441958099

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5809-9_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().