Veto Players and the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies

Abstract

The authors investigate the relationship between constitutional design and the rule of law in emerging democracies. The authors provide a formal logic to the Madisonian assertion that increasing the number of veto players strengthens the rule of law. The model shows that as the number of veto players in government increases, their ability to collude on accepting bribes decreases; therefore, their incentive to vote on legislation strengthening the rule of law increases. The authors classify governments according to the number of veto players, following the logic proposed by Tsebelis. The authors test hypotheses derived from their model on 35 emerging democracies using veto-player data that they gathered for the analyses. The authors find that systems with multiple veto players have higher levels of the rule of law. Furthermore, independent of the number of veto players, presidential systems have lower levels of the rule of law than do parliamentary systems.

Trapping the tigers: Regulation of market entry and the rule of law in SE Asia

“…This finding contrasts with previous literature arguing for a strong connection between democracy and the rule of law around the world (Maravall and Przeworski, 2003, Andrews and Montinola, 2004, North and Weingast, 1989. Previous scholarship argues the rule of law and political democracy are mutually constitutive and develop in parallel.…”

“…Arguments for democratic political institutions dominate the literature on credible commitment, yet they neglect an important element of governance: the laws on the books and the way public officials enforce them (Maravall and Przeworski, 2003, Tsebelis, 2002, Andrews and Montinola, 2004. This omission is important because many developing countries contain rules and regulations that may be enforced for the sole purpose of enriching the enforcer.…”

The Benefits of Balance: Credibility, the Rule of Law, and Investment in Latin America

“…My results are similar to those of Andrews and Montinola (2004) in this area, only my data set allows me to test a wide variety of additional hypotheses over a much longer time frame. My results are also in line with previous scholarship on credible commitment and the rule of law with regard to the central role that constraints on authority play for credibility (North and Weingast 1989;Keefer and Stasavage 2003;Henisz 2000;Barro and Gordon 1983).…”

“…In general, policy credibility is the key factor in many analyses of what creates commitments to investors' rights, including property rights and contract enforcement (North 1990;North and Weingast 1989;Henisz 2000Henisz , 2002Henisz and Zelner 2007;Keefer 2004;Keefer and Knack 2002;Hicken, Satyanath, and Sergenti 2005;Andrews and Montinola 2004). In these studies (and many others) investors privilege the government that can do relatively less harm, given political constraints, over the government that has the relative freedom to help but also to hinder investment.…”

Compromesso astorico: the role of the Senate after the Italian constitutional reform

“…As the core shrinks, the judiciary will find fewer opportunities to relocate the status quo without legislative overrule: a small core means that the legislature can retaliate on a larger number of possible statutory interpretations. Empirical evidence in favor of this argument has been presented by Tsebelis (2002) for advanced industrialized countries and from Andrews and Montinola (2004) for developing ones. Thus, the proposed reforms would decrease the courts' power in statutory interpretation in Italy.…”