Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work  Author(s): George
Tsebelis  Veto Players   Political scientists have long
classified systems of government as parliamentary or
presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such
distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example,
how are we to compare the United States, a presidential
bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a
parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto
Players advances an important, new understanding of how
governments are structured. The real distinctions between
political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in
the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over
policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a
scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why
an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in
their ideological distance from each other, increases policy
stability, impeding significant departures from the status q