The veto as electoral stunt: EITM and a test with comparative data (original) (raw)

Toward a New Typology of Vetoes and Overrides

Political Research Quarterly, 2001

This research develops a typology of vetoes and overrides based on the nature of the coalition that originally passed the legislation. We posit that both legislative and non-legislative objectives inform the strategies of the President and congressional leaders. The implications for measures of presidential and congressional power are considerable. Using veto and override data for the period 1969-98, we show that vote-switching between the passage of legislation and veto overrides is likely to occur only for a specific subset of legislation.

Institutional and Individual Influences on the President's Veto

The Journal of Politics, 2002

This article evaluates and compares "president" and "presidency" centered explanations of presidential activity with respect to one important presidential power, the veto. Using individual bill data for nine congresses characterized by divided party government, I estimate a logistic regression model of presidential vetoes. This contrasts with previous research, which has used annual aggregate data. Using individual bill data allows controls for objectionable legislation passed by Congress and enables me to measure and compare the "propensity to veto" of different presidents. I conclude that presidential vetoes are in substantial measure caused by Congress passing objectionable bills, but that even controlling for congressional behavior, presidents exhibit strikingly different veto behavior. Ford was most prone to using the veto, and Reagan, the least. Although external factors exert great influence on the president's veto decision, the individual choices and strategies of presidents also have an important influence.

MODELS OF VETOES AND VETO BARGAINING

Key Words executive-legislative relations, presidents, separation of powers, gridlock I Abstract Models of veto bargaining have become an important tool for formal institutional analysis. This chapter reviews the core model of veto bargaining and some of its more interesting and useful extensions, focusing on one of the best developed applications, the presidential veto over legislation. One of the primary attractions of these models is that they often produce crisp, testable empirical predictions. Our review focuses on 18 such predictions. We conclude with a brief review of the empirical evidence related to these hypotheses.

Veto players, party government and policy-making power

2010

Veto theory suggests that policy stability will ensue when there are a number of policy-diverse veto players (VPs) in a policy-making system. Its propositions on policy stability and change can be easily extended to policy-making power. This paper uses veto theory to explain variation in prime ministerial power.

Veto Power and Governmental Policy

2011

How does the power to veto affect governmental policy? We develop a game-theoretic model of an interaction between an expert, a proposer and a vetoer. The proposer and the vetoer do not know perfectly the consequences of policies and have to rely on an expert for this information. The expert transmits a message to the decision-makers and the communication is cheap talk: the message has purely an informational function. We use this model to analyze how the power of veto affects the information transmitted in equilibrium and the utilities of the players. The model has several important applications ranging from legislative and regulatory politics to corporate governance.

Item Vetoes and Attempts to Override Them in Multiparty Legislatures

Journal of Politics in Latin America, 2013

This paper analyzes the dynamics of vetoes and veto overrides in the context of a multiparty legislature using an original dataset from the period 1983–2007 in Argentina. We argue that the President can use an “item” or “partial” veto to selectively delete articles, while keeping enough distributive goods in the bill to break up the coalition responsible for its passage, thereby eliminating support for an override. Our research reveals that total vetoes – which affect all legislators equally – are more likely to be overridden than partial vetoes. Contradicting the received wisdom that in multiparty legislatures override attempts are more likely under a divided government, we find that override attempts are more likely in plurality governments. We use case analyses to illustrate the main arguments developed in this paper.

Veto Players in Presidential Regimes: Institutional Variables and Policy Change

Revista de Ciencia Política, 2009

this paper develops a computational model to explore the effect of veto players in presidential regimes. We discuss the relationship between the legislative powers of the president and the configuration of veto players, and analyze how the number of legislative parties and their cohesion affect policy stability. We develop a computational model to estimate the simultaneous impact of these factors in a conventional twodimensional policy space. the results suggest that party fragmentation has mixed implications while decree authority is a key factor explaining policy stability. the impact of most institutional variables is conditional on the position of the players.