Compare methods

	Collective Action Analysis	Veto Player Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Science
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1965	1995
Originator	Mancur Olson & Elinor Ostrom	George Tsebelis
Type	Formal model of group behavior	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674537514	Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691091891
Aliases	Logic of Collective Action, Olsonian Collective Action Theory, Free-Rider Analysis, Group Size and Public Goods Theory	Veto Players Theory, Veto Points Analysis, Tsebelis Veto Player Framework, Policy Stability Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Collective action analysis explains why rational, self-interested individuals will often fail to act together to secure a common interest, even when every member of the group would benefit from doing so. In his 1965 The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson overturned the prevailing assumption that groups with shared interests would naturally organize to advance them, showing instead that because the fruits of collective action are non-excludable public goods, each member has an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others. The problem worsens as the group grows: large, latent groups chronically undersupply their collective good unless they offer selective incentives or coerce participation, while small, privileged groups can succeed. Elinor Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons later documented how communities craft durable institutions that solve such dilemmas without the state or privatization, earning her the Nobel Prize.	Veto player analysis is a spatial-institutional framework, developed by George Tsebelis in his 1995 article and 2002 book, for predicting the capacity of a political system to change policy. A veto player is any individual or collective actor whose agreement is required to alter the status quo. The theory shows that the potential for policy change shrinks as the number of veto players grows, as the ideological distance between them widens, and as their internal cohesion increases — three structural variables that together determine a system's policy stability independently of constitutional labels such as presidentialism or parliamentarism.