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Scope of practice decisions, such as granting pharmacists independent prescriptive authority, are governed at the state level and are often contentious debates. Five states – Florida (FL), New Mexico (NM), Colorado (CO), Idaho (ID), and Oregon (OR) -- have created structures that can theoretically expand independent prescriptive authority through decentralized approaches rather than needing the legislature to approve each drug that pharmacists may prescribe. These approaches have the potential advantage of allowing the states to expand independent pharmacist prescriptive authority to address public health needs more quickly. Four distinct models have been identified from most to least restrictive in practice: 1) medical veto; 2) interdisciplinary committee; 3) board of pharmacy; and 4) pharmacist-determined. These models have generally focused on postdiagnostic and preventive care by pharmacists. In terms of enabling broad pharmacist prescribing, only two of these models have demonstrated success: board of pharmacy and pharmacist-determined. Pharmacy and public health stakeholders considering similar legislation in their own states should consider the success of these decentralized models prior to enacting legislation.

This paper develops a theory of the relationship between policy disasters and political institutions. Policy disasters, defined as avoidable, unintended extreme negative policy outcomes, are important political and historical events above that receive relatively little attention from political scientists and scholars of public policy. Using the predictions of punctuated equilibrium theory, I argue that systems with higher error accumulation will experience more policy disasters. These disasters will take two forms: disasters caused by policymaking negligence and disasters caused by policymaking mistakes. Systems with more veto players and weaker information flows will experience more disasters, but information flows will have a stronger impact than veto players. I test this theory using data on financial crises and natural and technological disasters across seventy countries over sixty years. I find strong evidence that systems with weaker information flows and more veto players tend to have greater disaster risk.

The Charter of the United Nations was designed to strictly prohibit the use of force between states and allow it only in minimal situations. The fear of repeating the scourge of WWII urged the superpowers to accord the license for military intervention exclusively to a particular entity, namely the Security Council. They granted themselves sweeping prerogatives, one of which is the authority to cast a veto. However, it was not expected, or at least unprepared for, that superpowers can use this veto against themselves. A situation that would inevitably lead to looking for alternatives to legalize military actions outside the ambits of the Council. Among these alternatives was the Uniting for Peace Resolution. Even though this resolution was created during an era where the international community did not lend much importance to domestic gross human rights violations, it might still serve as a legitimizing tool to challenge today’s compelling demands. But does it have enough legal cover to justify an act, which will otherwise be classified as aggression? If the answer is positive, has it been sought for other than for the purpose of its creation? If negative, what was the alternative when a situation demanding action was deadlocked in the Council? The article will try to seek answers to these questions.

This paper presents a theoretical model that explains how decision rules and communication jointly affect collective outcomes in a small community under epistemic uncertainty. To see the likelihood of social reform and the probability of sensible decision-making under uncertainty, we compare two types of decision rules: unanimity rule and majority rule with veto. Also, we analyze the role of communication among voters before the voting occurs. We show that there exist equilibria and that once each player’s preference is determined, the equilibrium behavior is specified. In addition, we use simulation methods to examine how the precision of group decision and the voters’ welfare vary.

The article argues that the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD), originally developed by Max Weber, is in its somewhat rejuvenated version a helpful framework in interpreting longer-term and more recent empirical trends in contemporary democracies, such as the growing personalization of politics, the emergence of populist leaders, rising levels of polarization, and the growing importance of social media. However, to realize the potential of the theory, it should be detached from Jeffrey Green’s most original, yet insufficiently realistic elaboration of plebiscitary democracy that he made a decade ago. The article argues that instead of a passive and unifiable entity, the citizenry should be thought of as reactive and deeply divided, a setting which can be characterized by the metaphor of the infamous Byzantine chariot races rather than that of the theater, implicit in Green’s theory. Plebiscitary democracy should be thought of as representational, where popular control is manifested as the veto power of the popular voice. Additionally, despite its realist minimalism, the theory we propose may still have some critical potential, because it adopts the refurbished ideal of competition. The article closes by identifying further avenues of theoretization leading towards a more elaborate view of PLD.

George Tsebelis distinguished two forms of veto players’ actions: institutional and partisan. In a democracy, the Church is not able to play either role because it is not an element of the state’s institutional structure. This was the source for Simon Fink’s proposal to look at the Church as a societal veto player (VP). The case of Poland shows, however, that such an approach becomes inadequate in numerous situations. The Church’s influence on political parties, and particularly the state’s institutions, may be exerted outside society. Performed on the basis of the existing literature and political debates conducted since 1989, the analysis of the social and political reality of Poland allows us to indicate the following four issues with respect to which the role of the Church as a VP The Church acted most often as a quasi-institutional VP (five cases), and once as a quasi-partisan VP. It never took actions based primarily on mobilizing society. This undermines the universality of findings and indicates the necessity of reconsidering the role of churches as societal veto players.

BackgroundFew studies have investigated tobacco industry interference in the tobacco control policies of Arab nations. This paper explores the tactics used by the industry to subvert tobacco control policies in Oman and offers lessons on how to prevent such interference in the future.MethodsWe searched the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Archive using the word ‘Oman’, names of government institutions, policymakers and local tobacco distributors. Extracted data were noted chronologically by key elements of tobacco control measures. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Health Ministers’ Council resolutions on tobacco control were also reviewed.ResultsOut of 1020 tobacco documents located, 327 were closely related to policy interference. Documents revealed that the industry met key government officials, offered in-kind services, used local diplomatic missions to influence Omani policymakers, opposed smoking bans, delayed regulations to lower tar and nicotine content of cigarettes, and to require effective health warnings, circumvented a tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship ban and provided voluntary codes as an alternative to effective regulations. Additionally, industry representatives lobbied individual countries in the GCC to veto tax increments and defeat consensus on agreed resolutions of the Health Ministers’ Council.ConclusionThe tobacco industry interfered in all key public health policies aimed to reduce tobacco use in Oman. There is an urgent need for the Omani government to enforce the Civil Code of Conduct and develop guidelines for all policymakers through implementing Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to curb the tobacco epidemic.

Do countries learn from their mistakes? Here we consider one example of this question with respect to banking crises using the concept of effective learning, that is, learning plus the ability to implement such learning. Excessive credit growth is widely considered to be the strongest contributor to banking crises. Thus, it is interesting to see whether banking crises are associated with lower rates of credit growth in the future and if so, what are major factors which influence such changes in behavior. In previous research we have found that, on average, banking crises are followed by substantially lower credit growth but this varies considerably across countries. Our hypothesis is that lower rates of future credit growth reflect a process of learning from one’s mistakes and taking corrective actions. This paper offers an investigation of some of the political economy factors that may influence whether crises result in greater discipline. Overall, we found very little average effective learning in stable autocracies and on the contrary, found considerable discipline in stable democracies. Nevertheless, we found even larger discipline effects in countries that transitioned to democracy in the wake of banking crises. Our results regarding the role of veto players and government turnovers are inconclusive.

This paper explores the changes to social security and health proposed in the Beveridge Report through the lens of the framework proposed by Mahoney and Thelen for exploring the relationship between political and institutional contexts, change-agents, and types of institutional change. We find that, in terms of social security, the Beveridge Report led to 'layering' in that it both built on an inherited legacy of institutions from the earlier Liberal Reforms. Although Beveridge assumed the existing of a national health service for his social security plans to work, he did not specify what form such a service could take. Bevan had the advantage of being a Minister of Health with a large government majority, but had to deal with both internal (in Cabinet) and external (primarily from the medical profession) attempts to veto his reforms. Bevan's changes to healthcare have to be seen in that context, as well as in relation to his own pragmatism, in converting the wartime Emergency Medical Service into the National Health Service. By utilising the full Mahoney and Thelen framework in two cases that were near-contemporary with one another, but when contrasted with one another, we show the potential of the framework in cross-case analysis in illuminating the relationship between political and institutional context, change-agents, the type of change that results.

We study optimal policy experimentation by a committee. We consider a dynamic bargaining game in which committee members choose either a risky reform or a safe alternative each period. When no redistribution is allowed, the unique equilibrium outcome is generically inefficient. When redistribution is allowed (even small amounts), there always exists an equilibrium that supports optimal experimentation for any voting rule without veto players. With veto players, however, optimal policy experimentation is possible only with a sufficient amount of redistribution. We conclude that veto rights are more of an obstacle to optimal policy experimentation than are the constraints on redistribution themselves. (JEL D72, C78, H23, D78, D71)

In random voting, the committee chair, whose vote decides in the case of a draw, is more often decisive than ordinary voters. Therefore, in the power indices literature, the committee chair is said to be more powerful. Players with a veto right are even more powerful still. Similarly, the production of threshold public goods may involve “tie-breaking players” (with more effective contributions) and “veto players” (specialists or larger players) whose contributions are necessary. We pose the question of whether power is beneficial for an individual. Except in the equilibrium where no player contributes, veto players are disadvantaged while tie-breaking players can be advantaged. In experiments with otherwise symmetric players, about 80% of the veto players contribute, but tie-breaking players also contribute almost as frequently as veto players, and significantly more frequently than ordinary players. Even with three times the costs of ordinary players, veto players stick to their behavior, while tie-breaking players reduce their contributions below those of ordinary players. Overall, powerful players always are worse off than ordinary players; thus, power seems not to pay off herein.

The president’s formal role in lawmaking comes through the veto power, although Neustadt noted the informal power of persuasion through bargaining. Building from Azari and Smith’s work on informati...

Why are democracies backsliding? I contend that a large productivity gap between economic groups motivates those with low productivity to capture the state for rent-seeking. They assess their relative position as weak and are willing to sacrifice certain democratic guarantees in exchange for favorable policies. Erosion takes two forms. (1) With high inter-class inequality and a large productivity gap among economic industries, losing economic elites capture the state through a political outsider who enacts favorable policy. Once in office, the outsider expands his personal executive control and attacks key democratic veto players. (2) When inter-class inequality is high but the inter-industry productivity gap is small, a united economic elite coordinate to stop a populist takeover. Traditional political elites respond to the populist threat by curtailing basic freedoms of speech and association. I use both quantitative and case study evidence from the US and Spain to support my main hypotheses.

Since the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament wields the power of consent over international (trade) agreements, enabling it to threaten a veto. Due to the extensive financial and reputational costs associated with a veto, the European Commission (hereinafter Commission) was expected to read these threats effectively. However, the Commission’s responses to such threats have varied greatly. Building on a fine-grained causal mechanism derived from information processing theory and an extensive process-tracing analysis of seven free trade agreements post-Lisbon, we explain why the Commission has responded differently to looming vetoes. Our analysis reveals that the variation in Commission responses derives from imperfections in its information-processing system, the ‘early-warning system,’ which had to be adapted to the new institutional equilibrium post-Lisbon. Because of this adaption process, factors exogenous to the parliamentary context (‘externalities’) as well as internal uncertainties (‘internalities’) add constant unpredictability to the Commission’s reading of the European Parliament.

We ask whether fiscal rules constrain incumbents from using fiscal policy tools for reelection purposes. Using data on fiscal rules provided by the IMF for a sample of 77 (advanced and developing) countries over the 1984–2015 period, we find that strong fiscal rules dampen political budget cycles. Our results are remarkably robust against inclusion of media freedom and the level of government debt as explanatory variables. Furthermore, we find a strong effect of fiscal rules in, amongst others, countries with fewer veto players, left-wing governments, established democracies, and more globalized economies. In addition, the effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles seems to be stronger after the global financial crisis, reflecting post-crisis expansion in the number of countries with strong fiscal rules, notably in the European Union.

This paper will focus on the recent unanimous veto of Bill 618 by all forty-four of the Saskatchewan Party’s MLAs. The rejected bill was a plan to deal with the ongoing suicide crisis affecting the Indigenous population of the province at an exponential rate. The seriousness of this public health crisis has led to civil outrage at the rejection of the bill and has created activism and protests in response. The research of this paper addresses how the past and present governments are culpable for current social problems facing Canada’s Indigenous peoples today. Colonial policies and programs have directly created the social conditions that cause suffering to Indigenous peoples living in Canada to this day. As such, it is the responsibility of Canada’s governments to take meaningful action to address these issues. What is already known about this topic is that Saskatchewan’s Indigenous youth have some of the highest rates of suicide in the country, and even the world. I conducted my research through examining different forms of media such as journals, news articles, videos, and legal documents. The legal documents I explored were the proposed bill itself, as well as the Constitution Act, 1982 and Treaty 6. Through studying Sections 7 and 15 of the Constitution Act, 1982 and Treaty 6 it is abundantly clear that Canada has not fulfilled its obligation to the Indigenous peoples of this country. The current mental health crisis proves this is glaringly true; my findings concluded that the Canadian government has failed and continues to fail its Indigenous population regarding policy. This blatant ignorance of treaty rights may begin to become remedied through the various branches of Canadian government working together to create a trilateral solution.

President Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832. I describe events leading to the veto and through the bank's dissolution in 1836 using private correspondence and official government documents. These sources reveal a political process through which charges against the bank took hold, accomplices and backup plans were lined up, and the bank was ultimately destroyed with the assistance of chartered banks in New York City. Although the aggressive means by which the bank was dismantled led to a system-wide financial failure and recession in the short term, the long-run outcome was likely a wider diffusion of banking services and a more efficient allocation of capital. The Federal Reserve benefited from applying a more rigorous regulatory structure onto the grid that the populists, free bankers, and National Banking System established.

In 2019, Ireland declared a ‘Climate Emergency,’ receiving plaudits from across the political spectrum for doing so. Some argued the country was experiencing an era of ‘new climate politics’: In 2017, Ireland had established the first Citizens’ Assembly on Climate, and in 2019 its Parliament debated a Climate Emergency Measures Bill, which was ground-breaking in its proposal to ban offshore oil and gas exploration. Yet, despite majority support for this Bill in Parliament, the minority Government blocked the legislation by refusing to grant a ‘Money Message,’ a potential veto activated following indication by an independent actor that a Bill would require the appropriation of public money. We introduce the concept of ‘policy stifling’ to capture how the Money Message was used to block the Climate Emergency Measures Bill. We conduct detailed process-tracing analysis, building on elite semi-structured interviews with policy makers and campaigners involved in the process. We argue that whilst the Government’s stifling undermined the new era of elite climate politics, it simultaneously boosted an emerging grassroots climate politics movement with the potential for effecting more radical change in the longer term.

This article intends to analyze the jurisprudence arising from the Spanish Constitutional Court in the art. 134.6 of the Spanish Constitution. This section of art. 134 constitutionalizes the power of the Government not to give its consent to the processing of proposals for laws that entail budgetary effects. After a briefing on the legal regime of the budget veto, we proceed to analyze each one of the sentences issued by the High Court. Given the role of supreme interpreter that the Constitutional Court holds, its jurisprudence could even influence certain political decisions. In the present case, an interpretation of art. 134.6 EC «pro government» could have contributed —if certain political circumstances also converge— to using the veto as a political instrument, as has happened in the XII legislature. On the contrary, an adequate interpretation of the precept —which we understand is given from STC 34/18— would be a crub on this politicized use of the budget veto power that the Government has.We think that this last sentence correctly frames art. 134.6 CE. From thisapproach derives a constitutional interpretation of the power of adequateand complete budget veto. This interpretation starts from the singularitythat the Constitution grants to the budget bill, and could stop the abusiveuse of it.Summary:I. Introduction. II. Brief approximation to the constitutional legal regime of the budget veto. III. Analysis of the constitutional jurisprudence in the art. 134.6 Spanish Constitution: from a deficient exegesis to a sufficient one. IV. Conclusions.

Examining the history of the UN creation in the first part of the article, the author focuses on an exceptionally significant issue settled in 1945 during the Crimean Conference of the Heads of the Three Great Powers, namely: the order of voting in the UN Security Council. Various appeals to renounce the “veto” of permanent members of the UN Security Council enshrined in the UN Charter have become the main leitmotif of numerous attempts of the United States and their closest allies to revise the UN Charter. Reviewing such proposals, the author notes that populist ideas the essence of which constitutes the call to replace, based on the principles of equality of all States, an international Organization by a supranational structure whose activities would actually be based on the principle of “who has force, has power” have been disseminated in Western political and scientific circles.The author goes on to consider the crucial question: whether the Organization have been able to cope with its main mission: to maintain international peace and security?Listing the outstanding universal documents of our time developed in the bowels of the UN, the author calls the most notable, in his opinion, achievement of the Organization — a real liberation of dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America from colonial oppression. Analyzing the activities of the UN, the author acknowledges that the Organization in many respects is still far from its unifying convergent essence: the US and its NATO allies lead the policy aiming at crashing the system of international relations, based on the central role of the UN in world politics; the US promote a concept that implies the creation of closed alliances to develop and implement measures bypassing the UN. Amid such realities, Russia, seeking to strengthen multilateral principles in international affairs, emphasizes the creation of a self-regulating international system, which requires collective leadership of the leading States that is represented geographically and civilizationally, and exercised with full respect for the central and coordinating role of the United Nations.The article also draws attention to the fact that modern reality identifies more and more intractable problems, which often lead to the “autonomization” of international law: “niches” that are not filled with legal material inevitably give rise to situations where the gaps concerned are governed by particular and special rules based on bilateral or regional foundations, The author sees the empowerment of international law in the approval of principles of intercivilizational communication, the pursuance of synthesis of various legal systems, ideologies, cultures, religions and other spiritual values, which would provide a reliable basis for strengthening the importance and influence of international law.

In 2005 the member states of the United Nations recognized a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) victims of mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. They acknowledged a special role for the U.N. Security Council in responding to these atrocities, including potentially authorizing military action using its extensive powers under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. However, the Council has very rarely been able to agree on appropriate action, and the five permanent Council members (“P5”), most notably China and Russia, have often vetoed or threatened to veto Council resolutions authorizing R2P action. The article argues that the veto poses a major impediment to the Council acting on its R2P responsibilities, and that to resolve it, the P5, and all U.N. member states, need to agree on a common ethical approach. The article proposes such an approach based on ethical concepts that are widely endorsed by states, especially in the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and explores its implications for legal and ethical controversies relating to the role of the Council, its obligations under R2P, and proposed reforms of the veto.

In many domains, committees bargain over a sequence of policies and a policy remains in effect until a new agreement is reached. In this paper, I argue that, in order to assess the consequences of veto power, it is important to take into account this dynamic aspect. I analyze an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game with an endogenous status quo policy. I show that full appropriation by the veto player is the only stable policy when legislators are sufficiently impatient; and that, irrespective of legislators' patience and the initial division of resources, there is always an equilibrium where policy eventually gets arbitrarily close to full appropriation by the veto player. In this equilibrium, increasing legislators' patience or decreasing the veto player's proposal power makes convergence to this outcome slower and the veto player supports reforms that decrease his allocation. The main predictions of the theory find support in controlled laboratory experiments.

This chapter scrutinises the processes that led to the appointment of the new Commission President after the European elections in 2019. The authors argue that the European Parliament did not show its teeth to the Member States and that the inter-institutional power balance shifted towards the European Council. Their findings further suggest that the European Parliament’s legal veto position is a necessary condition for a power balance dominated by the Parliament. Only the combination of the Parliament’s veto power and its internal cohesion can sufficiently explain situations in which the Parliament represents the primary EU institution.

The era of American leadership in the multilateral trading regime has ended. This paper argues that this current antipathy to trade is unsurprising: support for US leadership of the regime has always rested on a precarious balance among domestic interests. To overcome a historic bias in favor of home market production, American leaders created incentives for exporters to organize while creating roadblocks for import-competing firms and their employees. The dominance of the exporters’ voice had a significant influence on the policies the US pursued in the design and execution of the global trade regime. Most importantly, the absence of labor's voice undermined the prospect for “embedded liberalism” and instead resulted in an anemic system of adjustment for job loss at home and limited support for worker interests within the regime. While policymakers’ decision to shift power away from potential “veto” groups may have been necessary for US leadership of the Liberal International Order, this institutional design undermined a robust response to the economic dislocation thought to be a result of globalization. The result was a fracturing of the coalition in support of American leadership in the GATT/WTO regime.

Voting is one of the most prominent components of democracy. The one-vote veto, which requires the voting result to be only “yes” or “no”, is a particularly noteworthy type of voting with widespread application. When obtaining a “no” result, no useful information about the number of “no” votes and who votes “no” is disclosed. In this paper, we introduce a protocol for anonymous one-vote veto utilizing qubits and local Pauli operations $\mathbb {Z}$ and $\mathbb {X}$ , building simple processes for easy implementation under the current technology. For better elaboration, we give two examples: all voters cast “yes” votes and only one voter casts a “no.” Then, the corresponding experiment tests are conducted on the simulated IBM quantum computer to verify their feasibility. We also show that the proposed protocol has the desirable properties of privacy, fairness, verifiability and robustness. Furthermore, we analyze the proposed protocol’s security against cheating from eavesdroppers, a semi-honest server and malicious voters. This work is the first attempt to illustrate how qubits can be useful for building a secure anonymous one-vote veto strategy.

An article is devoted to the analysis of the functions and formats of political parties in consociational democracies. In particular, it is defined that parties that represent the interests of certain subcultures in society and that reach a consensus among themselves at the level of political agreements are called segmental. At the same time, parties that encapsulate different subgroups of the society that cooperate inside the party within main features of the consociational theory (grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality in representations, and independence of segments or society subcultures) are called consociational. The theory of consociationalism has received a wide range of theoretical additions and criticism from political scientists over the past fifty years. And while political parties should have been, by definition, one of the key aspects of research within such democratic regimes (parties are part of large coalitions and agents of representation of certain subcultures), there is very scarce number of literature that focuses on this aspect. Therefore, the presented article provides a description of the functions of political parties that could be observed as inside their subcultures as well as in interaction with other segmental parties. Based on the experience of two European countries in the period of “classical” consociationalism (Belgium and the Netherlands), we explain the functions of the parties we have defined in such societies with examples of relevant consociational practices in them. Simultaneously with the analysis of segmental parties, the article also offers the characteristics of consociational parties. The emergence of such parties has its own institutional and historical features. The way of further development of the party system and the level of preservation of consociational practices makes it possible to understand the nature of changes in the societies. Similarly, the analysis of the forms of party competition and interaction between segmental parties makes it possible to outline the forms of those consociational changes that are taking place in the research countries.

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é problematizar os impasses nas decisões sobre remoções e regularização fundiária a partir do papel das ações de planejamento urbano em assentamentos precários. A questão central é compreender os conflitos interescalares e os embates entre os modelos de desenvolvimento urbano e ambiental. Nosso objeto de estudo é o processo de remoção dos moradores do jardim Nova Esperança, em São José dos Campos-SP sob dupla perspectiva: o empreendedorismo municipal e o plano de urbanização e regularização fundiária como instrumento de negociação. Os impasses que resultam desses conflitos são analisados pela teoria dos atores com poder de veto, particularizando a tomada de decisão sobre o uso e a propriedade da terra diante das novas formas de ordenamento territorial. Abstract The objective of this article is to problematize impasses in decisions about removals and land regularization based on the role of urban planning actions in precarious settlements. The central issue is to understand the inter-scalar conflicts and clashes between the models of urban and environmental development. Our object of study is the removal process of residents from the Jardim Nova Esperança settlement, in the city of São José dos Campos, State of São Paulo, under a double perspective: municipal entrepreneurship and the urbanization and land regularization plan as a negotiation instrument. The impasses that result from these conflicts are analyzed through the veto player theory, particularizing decision-making about land use and land ownership in view of new forms of territorial planning.

Populism and technocracy reject vertical accountability and horizontal accountability. Populism and technocracy can combine to form ‘technocratic populism.’ The study assesses the extent to which democratic decay can be traced to the actions of technocratic populists as opposed to institutional factors, civil society, fragmentation and polarization. The main findings of this article are that technocratic populism has illiberal tendencies expressed best in its efforts at executive aggrandizement (cf. Bermeo, 2016). Without an effective bulwark against democratic erosion (cf. Bernhard, 2015), technocratic populism tends to undermine electoral competition (vertical accountability), judiciary independence, legislative oversight (horizontal accountability), and freedom of the press (diagonal accountability). The most effective checks on technocratic populist in power, this study finds, are the courts, free media, and civil society. This article highlights the mechanisms of democratic decay and democratic resilience beyond electoral politics. It indicates that a combination of institutional veto points and civil society agency is necessary to prevent democratic erosion (cf. Weyland, 2020). While active civil society can prevent democratic erosion, it cannot reverse it. Ultimately, the future of liberal democracy depends on the people’s willingness to defend it in the streets AND at the ballot box.

This paper studies the effect of veto right on players’ income in multi-player dynamic bargaining game. Based on a basic multi-person dynamic bargaining model generalized by the Rubinstein’s two-person alternating-offer bargaining model, the authors construct a dynamic multi-player bargaining game with veto players by adding a constraint to its negotiation process, which is obtained by studying the influence of exercising the veto right exercised by veto players. The authors emphatically describe the strategic game form of this dynamic bargaining game and study its equilibrium, then we analyze the relationship between the minimum acceptable payoff of the veto players and the equilibrium income. The research shows that veto right may increase the benefits of veto players and decrease the benefits of non-veto players. Veto players will not affect the players’ benefits and the form of equilibrium when the minimum acceptable payoff of every veto player is relatively low. When the minimum acceptable payoff of the veto player is high enough, he can only get the minimum acceptable payoff, and his benefit increases as his minimum acceptable payoff increases. In this case, the veto player has intention to obtain more resources by presenting a higher minimum acceptable payoff.

Постійні члени Ради Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй є важливим елементом міжнародно-правової системи миру та безпеки, яка постала після Другої світової війни. Водночас право вето є одним із ключових елементів їхнього міжнародно-правового статусу. Первинно воно постало як гарантія стабільної діяльності Радбезу та забезпечення балансу між великими державами в умовах холодної війни. Проте в багатьох випадках цей юридичний інструмент став інструментом політичної помсти в умовах біполярного світу. Така ситуація призвела до значної критики самого факту існування та застосування цього інструменту як своєрідного «гальма» для ефективної діяльності Організації Об'єднаних Націй загалом. Тому скасування права вето є одним із найбільш обговорюваних питань міжнародно-правового дискурсу навколо реформування Ради Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй, правових основ статусу постійних членів Ради. У статті розглядаються міжнародно-правові пропозиції щодо скасування або реформування права вето постійних членів Ради Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй. Особлива увага приділяється напрацюванню офіційних міжнародних робочих груп у рамках Організації Об'єднаних Націй. Виділяються юридичні основні пропозиції стосовно реформування права вето. Робиться висновок, що питання реформування повноважень постійних членів Ради Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй щодо застосування права вето ще тривалий час залишатиметься однією з найбільш актуальних проблем сучасного міжнародного публічного права в контексті реформування Організації Об'єднаних Націй загалом. Чинні пропозиції, напрацьовані як в науці права міжнародних організацій, так і у практичній діяльності Організації Об'єднаних Націй, передбачають три основні шляхи проведення змін: цілковите скасування права вето, обмеження або зміну порядку його застосування. Підкреслюється, що Статут Організації Об'єднаних Націй передбачає спеціальну процедуру щодо внесення змін до нього, реформування чи скасування права вето має бути здійснене відповідно до цієї процедури. Особливий акцент робиться на взаємопов'язаності міжнародно-правового дискурсу щодо скасування права вето постійних членів Ради Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй та інших питань їхнього правового статусу, зокрема і скорочення чи збільшення їхнього кількісного складу.

State legislatures in the United States began using the legislative veto in 1939 to block rules issued by state agencies. At present, 25 state legislatures possess some form of independent legislative veto authority. This study uses a transaction cost theoretical approach to analyse factors expected to influence the adoption and expansion of legislative veto oversight. Results indicate that such measures are more likely in non-Southern states when a single party controls the state legislature, while legislative size and professionalisation do not substantially affect legislative veto reforms. Empirical analysis differentiating veto power according to whether legislators can nullify or suspend rules shows some differences in the factors affecting the imposition of each oversight type. The most consistent finding is that empowering legislatures with legislative veto authority is more likely to occur with a Republican governor in office.

This article examines the neglected category of functional actor in securitisation processes. I argue that functional actors are a useful analytical category only if such actors are functionally di...

Federalism and the associated multi-level polity-structure have been frequently blamed for delaying the implementation of European Union (EU) directives. However, this verdict is incomplete as only a few studies open the “black box” of federalism to analyse the involvement of subnational parliaments and executives or second chambers in policy implementation. This article fills this gap and explains the transposition delay on the level of each individual implementation measure. Our novel data set covers about 850 directives and the corresponding 1,950 implementation measures between 1990 and 2018 in Germany. Using logistic regression models, we find that involving the subnational authorities substantially delays transposition. Subnational measures are three times more likely to be delayed than national ones. The effect of the veto power of a second chamber remains inconclusive. Our findings highlight the challenges federalism poses for the multi-level implementation of EU policies and have implications for the broader literature on compliance with public policies.

This article examines reform to the ‘veto’ power held by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The responsibility to react to mass atrocity crimes under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) lies predominantly in the hands of the Security Council, meaning that R2P and the veto are inseparable. Veto use can obstruct the Council from meeting its R2P, reflected by the ongoing crisis in Syria, over which 16 Council draft resolutions have been vetoed to date. This article applies a transitional cosmopolitan framework to offer an informal ‘Responsible Veto Restraint’ (rvr) recommendation for veto reform. This measure provides a more effective and feasible avenue for veto reform than the recommendations of the Accountability, Coherency, and Transparency Group’s Code of Conduct and the France-Mexico Joint initiative for veto restraint. rvr can help promote R2P action through the Security Council, offering an avenue for progress towards addressing the problem of atrocity crimes.

The Austrian government is extremely sceptical about the accession negotiations which are conducted by the European Commission on behalf of the European Union with Turkey and calls for the negotiation process to end. Serious reservations of Vienna have been raised by the current political situation in Turkey under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as by the standards of democracy in Turkey, which differ greatly from European standards. Serious deficiencies in rule of law, freedom of speech and independence of the judiciary, confirmed in the latest European Commission report on Turkey, do not justify, from Vienna’s point of view, the continuation of talks with Ankara on EU membership. In fact, Austria’s scepticism about the European perspective for Turkey has a longer tradition. This was marked previously in 2005 when the accession negotiations began. Until now, Austria’s position has not had enough clout within the European arena. Pragmatic cooperation with Turkey as a strategic partner of the EU, both in the context of the migration crisis and security policy, proved to be a key factor. The question is whether Austria, which took over the EU presidency from 1.7.2018, will be able to more strongly accentuate its reservations about Turkey and even build an alliance of Member States strong enough to block Turkey’s accession process.

In the article, the author analyzes the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the activities of the UN system. Draws attention tothe ineffectiveness of the UN itself, WHO, as well as the activities of the Security Council and the General Assembly during this period.Draws a parallel with the Spanish flu of the early twentieth century and explores its impact on the development of international orga -nizations.The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the priority for any state is primarily national interests, not common ones. The existenceof international law and international mechanisms has simply been forgotten in the context of protecting national interests. Internationalorganizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization have proved ineffective and inflexible and tooslow to deal effectively with today’s threats.In fact, during the pandemic, the UN failed to reach a consensus on joint action in a critical international situation. The Secretary-General has openly stated that he expects the problem to be resolved and concrete measures to be taken by the G-20.As for WHO, its actions have been somewhat slow, but it has responded to information from Member States.According to the WHO, the main reason for such a rapid spread of the virus was the reluctance of states to heed the recommendationsof the WHO.There is currently no alternative to health cooperation other than WHO. Despite the shortcomings in its operation, which haveemerged in the face of such a large-scale and rapid threat, it is appropriate to improve decision-making in such situations, as well as toprovide additional leverage over Member States. Collective security must come first here, not the sovereign interests of an individualstate, be it China, the United States or Germany.The main problem for both the UN and WHO has been the imperfect decision-making mechanism. On the issue with the UN –the right of veto in the Security Council, WHO – the recommendatory nature of the decisions. Considers the possibility of grantingsupranational powers to the UN in key areas where the issue of collective security must clearly prevail over national interests. Jointaction must be the only right solution for the international community in combating today’s threats. And the national interest in suchcases must come after collective security.

In this article, I argue that contemporary international law imposes an obligation upon the UN Security Council permanent members to refrain from using their veto repeatedly in ways that impede the Council from acting against violations of peremptory norms. This obligation not to veto emanates from the duty to cooperate to end violations of peremptory norms as enshrined in Article 41(1) of the International Law Commission Articles on State Responsibility. For this purpose, I demonstrate that the duty to cooperate itself possesses a peremptory character under the theory of ‘consequential jus cogens’, whereby effects of jus cogens norms are themselves peremptory. In doing so, this article contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the legal nature of the effects of jus cogens norms by showing that the theory of ‘consequential jus cogens’ is an application of the generally accepted maxim accessorium sequitur principale and thus forms part of positive international law.

A causa de la guerra en Siria se han multiplicado las llamadas que, desde hace varios años, se levantan pidiendo la reforma del Consejo de Seguridad. Algunos países y algunos dirigentes han comenzado a mostrar un desacuerdo más nítido que hace unas décadas tomando decisiones o haciendo declaraciones que afectan a dimensiones esenciales del mismo. Temas como la representatividad equitativa, el aumento del número de sus miembros o la cuestión del veto son algunos de los que llevan tiempo debatiéndose en ámbitos como el Open Ended Working Group o las Intergovernmental Negotiations. En este artículo presentamos, en una primera parte, una descripción de las propuestas de reforma, intentadas desde hace 25 años hasta el momento, en su afán de mejorar algunos aspectos del Consejo de Seguridad y ofrecemos, en una segunda parte, unas consideraciones finales que se desprenden de lo expuesto.

The tyranny of the majority is one of the most frequently discussed problems of democracy in political theory. It arises when winning majorities are fixed and permanent, and there are no checks on the majority’s ability to dominate the minority. In this paper, I investigate the effects of communication on the occurrence of majority domination. Theoretically, communication cuts both ways. On the one hand, forming and maintaining a coalition requires coordination between individuals, which is barely accomplishable without opportunities to communicate. On the other hand, communication strengthens prosocial orientations in groups and should thus prevent the permanent exclusion of minorities. I argue that publicity of communication is crucial. The prosocial effects of communication dominate when communication is public whereas exclusive majorities form under private communication. I test my claim in a series of laboratory experiments where five-member committees make distributional decisions using the voting mechanism ‘voting by veto’. Compared to a baseline treatment without communication, groups distribute benefits more equally when they have the opportunity to communicate in a public chat. When communication is private, however, majoritarian coalitions form that exclude a minority of group members from the distribution of benefits.

United Nations security council resolutions are voted on by fifteen members of the security council. A resolution will be deemed to be adopted if more than nine of the member states adopt it and all five permanent members do not use the veto. The five permanent members can vote yes, no, and abstain against a resolution. The vague set can be explained intuitively with the voting model, indicating the three conditions for voting. Which are favor, against, and abstention. When the agent nodes were selected by the consensus mechanism of delegated proof of stake (DPoS), the voting node can only vote support instead of against and abstention, and there are no penalties for malicious nodes. Besides, there is no clear method to select the agent node if the votes obtained by the last agent node are the same as the votes cast by others. This article puts forward a kind of vague set to improve DPoS consensus mechanism. Just like how human elections are held, this method allows each node to vote for the agent node. This is a fair and effective way of selecting agent node when alternate nodes are of the same value, it improves the security and fairness of blockchain, reduces the probability that malicious nodes will be selected as agent nodes. We prove that the maximum probability of nodes after the vote of the fuzzy membership degree is 0.5. The feasibility and effectiveness of the improved consensus mechanism is verified by examples.

In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, one assumes that all voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a common metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving only this ordinal (comparison) information, should select a candidate approximately minimizing the sum of distances from all voters. It is known that while the Copeland rule and related rules guarantee distortion at most 5, many other standard voting rules, such as Plurality, Veto, or $k$-approval, have distortion growing unboundedly in the number $n$ of candidates. Plurality, Veto, or $k$-approval with small $k$ require less communication from the voters than all deterministic social choice rules known to achieve constant distortion. This motivates our study of the tradeoff between the distortion and the amount of communication in deterministic social choice rules. We show that any one-round deterministic voting mechanism in which each voter communicates only the candidates she ranks in a given set of $k$ positions must have distortion at least $\frac{2n-k}{k}$; we give a mechanism achieving an upper bound of $O(n/k)$, which matches the lower bound up to a constant. For more general communication-bounded voting mechanisms, in which each voter communicates $b$ bits of information about her ranking, we show a slightly weaker lower bound of $\Omega(n/b)$ on the distortion. For randomized mechanisms, it is known that Random Dictatorship achieves expected distortion strictly smaller than 3, almost matching a lower bound of $3-\frac{2}{n}$ for any randomized mechanism that only receives each voter's top choice. We close this gap, by giving a simple randomized social choice rule which only uses each voter's first choice, and achieves expected distortion $3-\frac{2}{n}$., Comment: An abbreviated version appear in Proceedings of AAAI 2020

An increasing number of studies indicate that virtues affect brain structure. These studies might shed new light on some neuroethical perspectives suggesting that our brain network activity determines the acquisition and permanence of virtues. According to these perspectives, virtuous behavior could be interpreted as the product of a brain mechanism supervised by genes and environment and not as the result of free choice. In this respect, the neural correlates of virtues would confirm the deterministic theory. In contrast, I maintain that these findings do not undermine the role of willpower and freedom while reinforcing an interactionist view of free will. If virtues affect our neural system, then the predictability of the virtuous behavior follows. The likelihood of our future (moral) actions is primarily virtue-dependent; therefore, the acquired naturality of virtuous behavior is a source of predictable behavioral patterns outlining expected actions, which I propose to call Hypotheses of Action (HAs). However, the predictability of an action indicates its likeliness and not its certainty or necessity. The neural traces of virtues can be interpreted as major indicators of HAs. It is always possible for the agents to depart from their more likely, virtue-induced actions, but their deviations from the virtuous behavioral pattern are rare, as it is rare for the vicious/non-virtuous person to behave well systematically. This implies a reaffirmation of the notions of veto and consent as they provide a universal practical power affecting the subject’s use of moral virtues.

On September 11, 2019, twelve states parties invoked the Inter-American Treaty on Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), because they considered the crisis in Venezuela to have a destabilizing impact on the peace and security of the hemisphere. Venezuela was one of the twelve, voting in favor; this was because, on April 9, 2019, the Organization of American States (OAS) formally recognized Juan Guaido's representative, Gustavo Tarre, in lieu of Nicolas Maduro's Ambassador. At the OAS General Assembly in June, Tarre's appointment was approved in a much contested and heated session. The OAS has thirty-five member states and approximately one-third of its membership supported the invocation of the TIAR. The TIAR is the OAS's mutual defense pact; it was last invoked following the events of September 11, 2001. Article 5 of the NATO Charter, calling for collective action in the case of an armed attack on one member, is derived from Article 3 of the TIAR. Following invocation of the TIAR, the Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs (the OAS equivalent to the UN Security Council, but without veto power) held its 30th meeting in New York City during the UN General Assembly. The result of that meeting was the adoption of the Resolution under consideration here.

One of the central elements of Northern Ireland’s consociational framework is the idea of “cross-community support”. That principle finds its most concrete expression in the decision-making procedures of the Northern Ireland Assembly where, with respect to certain “key” decisions, cross-community “consent” is a formal procedural requirement. The procedures require that members of the Assembly register a “community designation” as “unionist”, “nationalist”, or “other”. When the procedures are activated, designated unionists and nationalists enjoy a potential veto power that designated others do not. Accordingly, the cross-community consent procedures have been criticized for privileging the two named communities at the expense of those who identify with neither. Thus far, however, the debate about the cross-community consent procedures has transpired at a very general level. This article advances the conversation by showing precisely how the procedures impact voting power within the Assembly. This should help to correct vague notions about the unfairness of the procedures. Voting power analysis shows that the critics overstate their case: in practice, “others” are not necessarily any more (or less) disadvantaged than designated unionists and nationalists. Moreover, it is argued here that cross-community consent is a valuable mechanism for managing the constitutional politics of Northern Ireland in an appropriately non-majoritarian way.

We investigate the computational complexity of electoral control in elections. Electoral control describes the scenario where the election chair seeks to alter the outcome of the election by structural changes such as adding, deleting, or replacing either candidates or voters. Such control actions have been studied in the literature for a lot of prominent voting rules. We complement those results by solving several open cases for Copeland$$^{\alpha }$$α, maximin,k-veto, plurality with runoff, veto with runoff, Condorcet, fallback, range voting, and normalized range voting.

In 2018, the Netherlands became the first democratic country to abolish its national referendum legislation. The Dutch referendum law of 2015–2018 allowed facultative, citizen-initiated, corrective, non-binding referendums, to veto specific types of laws passed by parliament. The referendum law included an ill-suited turnout threshold that created a strategic dilemma and a psychological side effect among voters. In the three years between introduction and abolition, two referendums were triggered. After the first referendum—a treaty between the EU and Ukraine, rejected by Dutch voters—support for referendums soured among centrist politicians and highly educated, progressive voters. Despite positive experiences with the second referendum, the legislation was abolished as part of the coalition agreement by the new government. This article provides a thick description of the Dutch referendum legislation trajectory (instigation, design, implementation, and abolition) to an international audience as well as a theoretical explanation of its comparatively late introduction and remarkably swift abolition. We discuss the roles of public opinion and coalition politics in the face of constitutional rigidity. Ultimately, we draw three broader theoretical lessons from the Dutch referendum experience.

A variety of direct democratic instruments allow “policy-making at the ballot box” (Gerber, 1999, p. 3), with the citizens having the last word on policy adoption and change. Criteria for the classification of direct democracy devices include who initiates a popular vote, who has control over the content of the proposal, whether it addresses statutory or constitutional law, or whether the result is binding or not. Interest groups use two main direct democracy instruments to influence policy-making: the initiative to put a new policy issue on the political agenda and the referendum to veto a policy adopted by the legislature. This chapter scrutinizes the effects of these tools on the policy process, on policy outputs, and on interest group populations. It shows that citizen groups benefit more than business groups from the initiative and referendum.

While scholars have long noted presidential powers over congressional lawmaking arising through persuasion, veto bargaining, and public appeals, we argue that an important tool is missing from this list. Specifically, presidents who are strategic in their choices of early coalition partners in Congress – such as effective sponsors of administration bills – significantly enhance their chance of legislative success. We identify more than 1,400 executive branch proposals appearing as bills in Congress between 1989 and 2006. We examine which members of Congress sponsor these bills, finding strong evidence of disproportionate sponsorship by effective champions, such as majority-party members, committee and subcommittee chairs, lawmakers with proven effectiveness in the previous Congress, party leaders, and senior lawmakers, all else equal. Analyzing the fate of these proposals, we find that much of the success of the president’s agenda in Congress depends on these critical and strategic partnerships with effective congressional proponents.