Veto Player Analysis

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.