In this study the structure-induced equilibrium approach for modeling democratic institutions is extended to allow for the added structural features of executive veto and legislative override. A multidimensional model is presented for a budgetary process involving three actors -a legislature, an appropriations committee, and an executive. In order to focus attention on the role of the veto and override possibilities, simplifying assumptions are made with regard to other aspects of the agenda formation process. In particular, the committee has monopoly agenda power, a closed amendment control rule is operative, and perfect-foresight expectations are held by the committee and the executive. Given these assumptions, utility maximization by the several actors generates a budget outcome characterized as a structure-induced equilibrium. The general model is illustrated geometrically with a two-dimensional example, permitting budget outcomes to be analyzed for various combinations of veto rules and override provisions. The analysis demonstrates that budget outcomes are sensitive to alternative specifications of veto rules and override provisions. In the illustration, executive veto power is shown to vary directly with both the permissiveness of the veto rule and the stringency of the override provision. Similar relationships, however, are not found to exist for total budget expenditures.
P roponents of giving the president the authority to use a line-item veto argue that the institutional change is needed to limit special-interest legislation and restrain spending. Opponents respond that it would grant too much added power to the president, thereby upsetting the delicate balance wisely crafted by the founding fathers. This article focuses on the presumption, evidently shared by both sides in the debate, that adoption of item-veto authority will have significant consequences in terms of budget outcomes and the distribution of power. Curiously, there presently exists little empirical support for the presumption that item-veto authority is important. Most studies comparing states with various types of veto authority have failed to detect significant effects associated with item veto. Additional tests of our own are consistent with these results. After reviewing the empirical evidence, we reconsider the alleged effects of item-veto authority by seating the popular depiction in an explicit model of the budgetary process. Formal modeling exposes logical inconsistencies contained in popular veto discourse. Further, the model makes clear that the predicted consequences of item veto, commonly projected as ubiquitous, in fact arise only in select settings.
Abslract. This study examines the effects of alternative executive veto structures in a model of the budgetary process. For the model examined it is shown that the outcome of the budgetary process must be contained in the Pareto set if the executive has either no veto authority or the authority to exercise an all-or-nothing veto. When the executive has item veto authority, however, the outcome need not be contained in the Pareto set.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.