Veto players and policy adaptability: An intertemporal perspective

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. Veto player theory, a very influential approach in comparative politics, has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the expense of the ability to change policy when necessary. This paper argues that once intertemporal considerations are explicitly included, it is not necessarily true that polities with more stable and credible policies have more difficulty in adapting their policies, nor that polities with more veto players have more difficulty in adjusting policies to new circumstances. More generally, the paper argues that, when studying the effects of political institutions on policy outcomes, an intertemporal perspective might lead to predictions different from those emanating from more a-temporal approaches.