3
advising and, especially, from the standpoint of our assumptions about the nature of the
political world. I argue that the formalized veto player approach is not suitable for advisory
purposes, whereas the veto point approach opens up the horizon towards actors’ interests and
strategies which may end up in policy blockade, but which may also be able to circumvent
constitutionally prescribed veto points. Further, my assumptions about the nature of politics
and democratic policy making do lead me to the conclusion that the veto player approach is a
very sophisticated model. As politics in my ‘Weltsanschauung’ is, however, determined by
contingencies, power and transaction costs, the veto point approach with its openness towards
societal interests and the multi-dimensionality of party competition emerges as the more
useful tool to understanding and explaining contemporary welfare state reforms.
2
Players or Points? The ‘Theoretical’ Core
In the current era of “permanent austerity” that reigns in affluent welfare states (Pierson
1998), veto power arguments have a very high plausibility, as veto preferences seem to be
nearly everywhere. Because most of the policy reforms focus on consolidation or
retrenchment of social rights or transfer levels, opposition and protest is virtually
omnipresent. Hence, the theoretical excess value of both approaches, the veto player
(Tsebelis 2002) as well as the veto point (Immergut 1992) approach is that both prescribe
from an institutional point of view systematically who the veto players are or at which points
veto power may become effective.
To begin with, George Tsebelis has made the most intensive efforts to put forward a coherent
‘theory’ of veto players (Tsebelis 2002), and as Tsebelis hopes, “veto players theory can
become the basis of an institutional approach to comparative politics” (Tsebelis 2002: 289).
His main argument is summarized by Tsebelis himself:
Convention