Veto Players in Presidential Regimes.

This paper develops a computational model to expand the theory of veto players into the realm of presidential regimes. We bridge two strands in the study of comparative institutions: the work on veto players in parliamentary systems and the analysis of executive-legislative relations under presidentialism. In the first part of the paper we introduce the basic concepts and outline the setup for the analysis. Section two explores the relationship between the legislative powers of the president and the configuration of veto players in presidential regimes. Section three discusses how the number of legislative parties and their internal cohesion affect policy stability. In the fourth section, we develop a computational model to estimate the simultaneous impact of these factors in a conventional two-dimensional policy space. The results suggest that constitutional decree authority is a key factor explaining policy stability in presidential regimes, and that the impact of most institutional variables is conditional on the policy position of the key players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]