Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-dqfph Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-16T05:21:09.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coalition theory: a veto players’ approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2013

George Tsebelis  and
Eunyoung Ha
George Tsebelis
Affiliation:
Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Eunyoung Ha*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA
*
*E-mail: tsebelis@umich.edu, Eunyoung.Ha@cgu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Coalition theories have produced arguments about the importance of party positions for participation in government coalitions, but have not connected the existing government institutions (in particular agenda setting) with the coalition government that will be formed. This article presents a veto players’ approach to coalition formation, which pushes the logic of non-cooperative game-theoretic models one step further: we argue that policy positions play a significant role in coalition formation because governments in parliamentary systems control the agenda of the policymaking process. As a result, the institutions that regulate this policymaking process affect coalition formation. In particular, positional advantages that a government may have (central policy position of formateur, fewer parties, and small policy distances among coalition partners) will become more necessary as a government has fewer institutional agenda setting advantages at its disposal. The empirical tests presented in this paper corroborate these expectations by explicitly accounting for the conditional effects of policy positions and institutional agenda setting rules on one another in a set of multilevel logit models.

Keywords

veto playerscoalitionsinstitutions

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 331 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Austin-Smith, D. Banks, J. (1988), ‘Elections, coalitions, and legislative outcomes’, American Political Science Review 82: 405–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, D., Alimadhi, F. (2007), ‘Logit mixed: mixed effects logistic regression’, in K. Imai, G. King and O. Lau, Zelig (eds), Everyone's Statistical Software. Retrieved from http://gking.harvard.edu/zelig Google Scholar
Baron, D. (1991), ‘A spatial bargaining theory of government formation in a parliamentary system’, American Political Science Review 85: 137–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budge, I., Robertson, D. Hearl, D. (eds) (1987), Ideology, Strategy, and Party Change: A Spatial Analysis of Post-War Election Programmes in Nineteen Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crombez, C. (1996), ‘Minority governments, minimal winning coalitions, and surplus majorities in parliamentary systems’, European Journal of Political Research 29: 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diermeier, D. Feddersen, T. (1998), ‘Cohesion in legislatures and the vote of confidence procedure’, American Political Science Review 92: 611–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodd, L. (1976), Coalitions in Parliamentary Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Doering, H. (1995a), ‘Time as a scarce resource: government control of the agenda’, in H. Doering (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe, New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 223–246.Google Scholar
Doering, H. (1995b), ‘Is government control of the agenda likely to keep legislative inflation at bay?’, in H. Doering (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe, New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 654–687.Google Scholar
Doering, H. (2001), ‘Parliamentary agenda control and legislative outcomes in Western Europe’, Legislative Studies Quarterly 26: 145–165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elgie, R. (2005), ‘From Linz to Tsebelis: three waves of presidential/parliamentary studies?’, Democratization 12: 106–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferejohn, J., McKelvey, R. Packell, E. (1984), ‘Limiting distributions for continuous state Markov voting models’, Social Choice and Welfare 1: 45–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franzese, R. (2003a), ‘Multiple hands on the wheel: empirically modeling partial delegation and shared policy control in the open and institutionalized economy’, Political Analysis 11: 445–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franzese, R. (2003b), ‘Quantitative empirical methods and context conditionality’, Newsletter of the Organized Section on Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association 14: 20–24.Google Scholar
Gelman, A. Hill, J. (2007), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hallerberg, M. von Hagen, J. (1999), ‘Electoral institutions, cabinet negotiations, and budget deficits within the European Union’, in J. Poterba and J. von Hagen (eds), Fiscal Institutions and Fiscal Performance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 209–232.Google Scholar
Heller, W.B. (2001), ‘Making policy stick: why the government gets what it wants in multiparty Parliaments’, American Journal of Political Science 45(4): 780–798.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, J. (1996), ‘The vote of confidence in parliamentary democracies’, American Political Science Review 90: 269–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalandrakis, T. (2000), ‘General equilibrium parliamentary government’, thesis defended at University of California Los Angeles.Google Scholar
King, G., James, A., Nancy, B. Michael, L. (1990), ‘A Unified Model of Cabinet Dissolution in Parliamentary Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science 34: 846–871.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laakso, M. Taagepera, R. (1979), ‘Effective number of parties: a measure with application to West Europe’, Comparative Political Studies 12: 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, M. Schofield, N. (1990), Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laver, M. Shepsle, K. (1996), Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leiserson, M. (1966), ‘Factions and coalitions in one-party Japan: an interpretation based on the theory of games’, American Political Science Review 62: 70–87.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1981), Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries, New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1999), Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Luebbert, G. (1986), Comparative Democracy: Policy Making and Governing Coalitions in Europe and Israel, New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupia, A. Strom, K. (1995), ‘Coalition termination and the strategic timing of parliamentary elections’, American Political Science Review 89: 648–665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, L. Stevenson, R. (2001), ‘Government formation in parliamentary democracies’, American Journal of Political Science 45: 33–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKelvey, R. Schofield, N. (1986), ‘Structural instability of the core’, Journal of Mathematical Economics 15: 555–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKelvey, R. Schofield, N. (1987), ‘Generalized symmetry conditions at a core point’, Econometrica 55: 923–933.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Persson, T. Tabellini, G. (2000), Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy, Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Raudenbush, S. Bryk, A. (2002), Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods, 2nd edn., Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publishing.Google Scholar
Riker, W. (1962), The Theory of Political Coalitions, New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Saalfeld, T. (2010), ‘Veto players, agenda control and cabinet stability in 17 European parliaments, 1945–1999’, in T. König, G. Tsebelis and M. Debus (eds), Reform Processes and Policy Change: Veto Players and Decision-making in Modern Democracies, New York: Springer, pp. 125–143.Google Scholar
Sartori, G. (1976), Parties and Party Systems, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schofield, N. (1995), ‘Coalition politics: a formal model and empirical analysis’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 7: 245–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sened, I. (1996), ‘A model of coalition formation: theory and evidence’, Journal of Politics 58: 350–372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steenbergen, M. Jones, B. (2002), ‘Modeling multilevel data structures’, American Journal of Political Science 46: 218–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsebelis, G. (2002), Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Neumann, J. Morgenstern, O. (1944), Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Warwick, P. (1994), Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Warwick, P. (1996), ‘Coalition government membership in Western European parliamentary democracies’, British Journal of Political Science 26: 471–499.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warwick, P. (1998), ‘Policy distance and parliamentary government’, Legislative Studies Quarterly 23: 319–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weingast, B. (1992), ‘Fighting fire with fire: amending activity and institutional change in the post-reform congress’, in R. Davidson (ed.), The Post Reform Congress, New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 142–168.Google Scholar
Zucchini, F. (2011), ‘Government alternation and legislative agenda setting: lessons from Italian politics’, European Journal of Political Research 50(6): 749–774.CrossRefGoogle Scholar