Policy Change: What Institutions Do in Dynamic Settings.

Political Scientists have been explicitly concerned with the role of decision-making institutions in policymaking since the beginning of modern political science, if not earlier. Contemporary formal approaches such as the social choice based analyses of Tsebelis's Veto Players theory (2002) have formed the foundation of a good deal of comparative political research on crossnational policy changes. This paper shows that the static assumptions that underlie these analyses drive a number of the most important conclusions of these arguments. When models such as Veto Players are put in motion the resulting conclusions about policy dynamics become more ambiguous. This finding helps to explain why these arguments have been so difficult to square with empirical reality across contexts, suggests a possible explanation for divergence from the standard veto players arguments, and points to simulation based theoretical exercise aimed at specifying the circumstances where the conclusions based on static analyses hold and where they fail. The paper concludes with the observation that while static analysis is excellent for demonstrating how institutions work in any one circumstance, they are more limited in explaining what institutions do to policy changes across different dynamic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]