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This chapter develops a causal model for explaining the performance of liberal democracies. The model builds on explanatory models from three theoretical strands: comparative research on democracy, comparative public policy, and the veto player approach advocated in the context of the new institutionalism. It integrates formal and informal institutional factors as well as the three most-important non-institutional factors for explaining performance: the national level of wealth, the ideological orientation of the government, and the openness of the economy. The causal relationship between these factors is conceptualized on the basis of rational choice institutionalism. Furthermore, this chapter includes a discussion of the constitutional and partisan veto-player indices for measuring institutions. It concludes with a set of specific hypotheses on the effect of formal and informal institutions on political effectiveness.

This chapter examines the hypotheses about the impact of formal and informal institutions on the level, stability, and the structure of political effectiveness of western democracies. It presents a re-analysis of Arend Lijphart's Pattern of Democracy (1999) and investigates the validity of various veto player indices. It is shown that political institutions do matter, but formal and informal institutions cause different effects; both matter only sometimes and only to a limited degree.

Veto players and win sets in a pluralitarian democracy, compared to those in a proportional regime; and in a unitary compared to a federal regime. Duverger's Law. Constitutional moments in the United States. The unconstitutionality of the great constitutional changes there.

This chapter examines three auxiliary hypotheses that flow from the main argument. First, in countries with more veto players it is less likely that political leaders will be able to form deeper integration agreements. As trade agreements become more constraining, they will prompt greater resistance from more groups. Hence, countries marked by a large number of veto players are unlikely to accede to agreements that aim to achieve more extensive integration. Second, in the same vein, political leaders are also unlikely to enter preferential trading arrangements that include more constraints, such as a dispute settlement mechanism. Finally, in countries with more veto players, we expect greater delays between signing and ratifying agreements. As the number of veto players rises, so does the time needed for the government to convince these groups of the agreement's value and to design ways of compensating those that will be harmed by it.

This chapter addresses the issue of whether the domestic institutional architectures of the fifteen member states of the European Union (EU) affect the way in which they react to the challenges of European governance. More specifically, it empirically tests two different models in order to assess whether macro institutional features are systematically correlated with their degree of adaptation to the EU, using a data set from all fifteen EU states for the period 1986–2000. The first model tested is that of Lijphart (1999), who drew a distinction between consensual and majoritarian institutional architecture, and suggested that the EU displays the typical features of a consensual system; tests are run to determine whether the consensual model represents a favourable precondition for a member state’s adaptation to EU politics. The second model, that of Tsebelis (2002), turns around the concept of formal veto players (VPS); tests are run to determine whether the number of VPS affects the domestic process of Europeanization. The analysis demonstrates that domestic institutions influence the way in which national political systems relate themselves to the EU and adapt their normative framework to the process of Europeanization; a low number of veto points facilitates this process, by reducing the internal decision-making costs and favouring the flexibility and promptness of the policy-making system, but institutional isomorphism and consensual style do not facilitate the interaction between the national and the European level.

In the wake of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, many observers expected that Japan would decide to abandon nuclear power as a major energy source. Others expected that it would strongly reaffirm nuclear power as a necessary foundation of Japan's prosperity and security. In fact it proved unable to chart a clear long-term nuclear policy direction for three years after the disaster. This policy failure was the result not only of the face-off between the “nuclear village” and public opinion, but also the stalemate between the many entrenched veto players in the nuclear policy arena. Given the large number of veto players, in the future we can expect continued national-level nuclear policy indecision, combined with a gradual restart of bits and pieces of the nuclear estate that find their way through the regulatory and political maze.

This concluding chapter summarizes the most important results of this investigation into the development of political effectiveness in western democracies since 1974, and the impact of political institutions. The findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical and practical implications. The study stresses that the effect of institutions is more complicated than most of the neo-institutionalist approaches assume. No clear predictions can be made on the basis of institutional factors. Consequently, the analyses do not support the widely-held assumption that fundamental political problems can simply be resolved through institutional reforms of liberal democracies.

Temporary increase in number of veto players. Revolt of the landed class. Marxist explanation. Unionism and the British Empire. Primordial unionism. Bonar Law: the first non‐Anglican to lead the Conservative Party. Ireland: in the Union, but its opinions not to count.

This chapter compares the policy and political outcomes that followed from the institutional structures generated by the European Convention, the Treaty of Lisbon, and the default outcome of a failure of negotiations during the process of European integration, the Treaty of Nice. The institutions produced under these different arrangements empowered different actors to create the policies of the EU. The comparison is based on the theory of veto players and is aimed at demonstrating the potential differences in policy outcomes for the EU had future policies been made in each of these institutional settings. In particular, it focuses on the effects of different institutional arrangements on the democratic deficit and the extent to which they strengthen the capacity of the judiciary powers and the bureaucracy to create policies independently from electorally accountable actors.

How are decisions coordinated across sectors in the EU political system? Frequently, more cross-sectoral coordination is seen as increasing the number of veto players, thus increasing the likelihood of blockages and lowest common denominator solutions. It is for this reason that historically low cross-sectoral coordination in the EU political system is often believed to facilitate decisions. This chapter explores actual coordination processes in the European Commission and Council and finds that, over time, the organization of cross-sectoral coordination has increased. Combining procedural knowledge with case study insight on legal acts such as the Liberalization of Services Directive or the REACH Directive, it challenges the view that these developments necessarily lead to a joint-decision trap. When used strategically, cross-policy coordination can also yield exit, because it allows certain actors to influence who becomes a veto-player and/or to move a decision horizontally or vertically into an arena favourable to the desired outcome.

This chapter re-examines the original joint-decision trap (JDT) model in light of this author's later work and the research presented by Gerda Falkner and her colleagues in this volume. Pointing out that a focus on the joint-decision mode was not meant to deny the existence of other modes of EU policy-making, it is nevertheless argued that the mechanisms identified in the JDT model continue to shape the possibility, quality, and direction of EU legislation. But in order to increase its explanatory power, the model should be extended to take explicit account of the impact of judicial law-making and Commission strategies on bargaining constellations in the Council. Even then, however, the model cannot provide complete explanations. Thus the chapters in this volume have indeed identified empirical influences on the perceptions and preferences of policy actors, and hence on the chances of agreement, that should be explained within a ‘constructivist’ frame of reference, rather than by reference to a ‘rational-choice’ bargaining model.

This chapter concludes the book by summarizing the argument and evidence and discussing avenues for additional research. This book is not intended to be the last word on Access Point Theory, but rather to inspire a broader research agenda investigating the role of domestic institutions on policy outcomes. As such, the conclusion discusses how Access Point Theory can be extended to policy outcomes beyond just complexity and bias, such as level of delegation; to additional policy areas, such as budgetary policy and consumer regulations; and to non-democracies. In addition, the conclusion discusses how Access Point Theory and Veto Player Theory can be combined to provide a more detailed explanation of when policy change is possible and what that policy change will look like.

The analysis of external anchoring is developed in two different directions: the key mechanisms that allow the process of anchoring to take place and are the connections with the internal actors. The empirical research revealed that the external/internal nexus is characterized by a chain of anchoring where, if successful, there are the following steps: continuous conditionality actions, creation of opportunities, perception of them by different elites and citizens, weakening of veto players, shift in cost-benefit balance, rule adoption, more substantive transformations, rule implementation and related monitoring, and rule internalization when also structural or deeply rooted cultural factors are changed or reassessed differently. The possibility that the research results may be similar if other areas are considered is also assessed.

The authors examine how formal political institutions mute or amplify the impact of losing on attitudes toward the political system. They can do so in one of several ways: by defining the rules of the process by which losers are produced in the first place, usually through the electoral system; by determining the substance of government policy, and how close policy is to the preferences of the losers; and, finally, by determining the boundaries of how power, once allocated, can be exercised by the winners, that is, the constraints on the ability of the winners to bring about policy change. We find that specific institutions, and not just combinations of institutions, help to shape the response of losers. Losers express less negative views about the political system than winners when electoral rules are more proportional, when the political system has a greater number of veto players, and when power is shared within the political system. We also show that federalism allows losers some say in the system, and therefore helps make losers more positive towards the system.

Chapter 5 deals with a particular issue which has been discussed in the literature over the last decade. It examines the relevance of amendment rules, i.e. those rules relevant for ratification of an amendment bill. Yet, while researchers following veto-players theory could not find any effect of amendment rules on the outcomes of constitutional reforms, be they defined as frequency of amendments or scope of change, the research summarized in this chapter draws attention to the impact of amendment rules on negotiations. Negotiators try to anticipate potential vetoes. However, this is not always possible, and it is the particular linkage of negotiations and ratification that makes a difference.

This chapter discusses the role of national water institutions in water management and veto players as inhibitors of effective water management. The water framework directive (WFD) imposes a top-down model for water management that have to be applied by all states in order to create some level of harmonization of administrative space in the EU called Europeanization. Political veto players consist of a number of constituencies that perceive the implementation of WFD as a threat to their interests. These political veto players are primarily water users who are concerned about forfeiting perceived entitlements to water use. Other veto players are institutional — already established institutions could view with suspicion new authorities entrusted with water management or existing authorities vested with new powers.

This introductory chapter presents a framework to understand agenda setting and its policy implications. It argues that there are three dimensions of agenda setting: the partisan, the institutional, and the positional. The partisan dimension focuses on whether there is a cohesive majority in the policy-making institutions. The institutional dimension focuses on the specific provisions regulating who makes proposals and under what conditions they can be amended. The positional dimension focuses on the relative ideological positions of the legislative actors involved, because their positions along with their institutional prerogatives affect their ability to promote policy goals. The chapter explains the interaction between these dimensions and points out how each one of them is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the production of outcomes conforming to the preferences of the actor(s) that hold the majority, or have agenda setting powers, or are centrally located. The chapter also outlines the book’s organization.

This chapter concludes the volume. In normative terms, the Judiciary revisions imposed on CEE since 1989 (and now the West) exhibit an unmistakable pattern: they transfer political power away from majoritarian institutions to non-majoritarian ones, from elected officials to judges; exclude the ‘sovereignty people’ from a voice in the Judiciary’s make-up; and insulate judges from accountability and liability to democratic boundaries. This Template amounts to the Americanization of the European Judiciary, and reflects the Network Community’s ambition to rule through the Judiciary (in Europe, but perhaps globally). In causal terms, a nexus was discovered explaining the Template’s puzzling ubiquity: the agency of a class of transnational elites sharing a collective identity and solidarity; their paradigmatic assumptions about the Judiciary’s role in democracy, and the coerciveness of their hegemonic discourses, which the public is unable to fathom or negotiate. The Network’s motivation is not solely the aspiration to solve mankind’s problems, but the all-too-human will to the power to arbitrate between all other political actors. A crucial but ‘invisible’ causal factor was the omission by the main veto players, elected representatives in parliaments, to forestall their own disempowerment.