18
Interest Groups as Veto Points?
In his innovative contribution, Bonoli (2001) reviews the veto point approach, thereby
explicitly referring to Immergut (1992), and applies and modifies this model on the ground of
his empirical observations of welfare state reforms in Switzerland, France and the U.K. His
main argument is that in corporatist countries, the necessity for governments to negotiate
welfare state reforms with the parties in the labor market (and especially trade unions) creates
an additional de facto veto point. “ In such contexts, the potential threat of the trade unions
can de facto amount to an additional veto point” (Bonoli 2001: 241). Convincingly he refers
to the original contribution of Immergut, and stresses the function of formal (constitutional)
rules of the game and their interplay with the imperatives of electoral competition in modern
democracies. However, by ‘bringing in’ the assumed veto power of trade unions, the
prototype of a pro-welfare actor in Bonoli’s conception, he merges the point and player
perspective. To recap, Immergut started with the rules, and the rules in her conception do not
act – actors act and they are even free to ignore or break the rules (if they can). Bonoli
assigns interests groups de facto power to and the opportunity to veto policy reforms. As an
illustration, he refers to concertated welfare state reforms in Europe where governments had
to make concessions to trade unions (and employers’ associations, one could add). Such
trilateral reforms would entail, so Bonoli, lower electoral risks and higher capacity to retrench
and modernize the welfare state simultaneously.
In a similar vein, Schludi (2001) argues that for pension reforms in European social insurance
countries, the political game in parliament could be supplemented and in fact circumvented
by reform consensus in the corporatist arena. Schludi, however, argues that this logic of
reform politics holds true even if trade unions cannot be taken as formal veto players. In his
empirical investigation he refers to linkages between interest groups and political parties,
showing convincingly how, especially in the German case, the left wing of the Social
Democratic Party (SPD) sought and finally relied on the backing of the traditionalist trade
union movement in order to influence the intra party politics of welfare state reforms.
This is not the place to discuss the ‘social pact literature’ (cf. Molina/Rhodes 2002) and the
implicit or explicit argument that corporatist reforms enable effective alternative reform
routes in addition to partisan politics in advanced welfare states. Elsewhere, we argue
(Siegel/Jochem 2003) that the reform potential of tripartite reform packages is in some cases
Convention