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	Government Formation Model	Veto Player Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Science
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1989	1995
Originator	David Baron & John Ferejohn; David Austen-Smith & Jeffrey Banks	George Tsebelis
Type	Non-cooperative bargaining model of government formation	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Baron, D. P., & Ferejohn, J. A. (1989). Bargaining in Legislatures. American Political Science Review, 83(4), 1181-1206.	Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691091891
Aliases	Legislative Bargaining Model, Baron-Ferejohn Model, Formateur Model, Portfolio Allocation Model	Veto Players Theory, Veto Points Analysis, Tsebelis Veto Player Framework, Policy Stability Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	The government formation model is a non-cooperative bargaining theory explaining how a cabinet and the division of its portfolios emerge when no party holds a majority. In the canonical Baron-Ferejohn (1989) framework, a head of state or chance mechanism recognizes one party as formateur with a probability often proportional to its seat share; the formateur proposes a government and an allocation of the spoils of office, and the proposal takes effect only if a legislative majority accepts. Austen-Smith and Banks (1988) embed this in an electoral and coalition setting. The model's signature result is a proposer (formateur) advantage: the party that gets to propose secures a disproportionate share of portfolios.	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.