Abstract

When considering the implications for policy outcomes of the dispersion of policymaking authority across multiple actors, recent veto-actor scholarship has emphasized its potential to privilege the status quo and thus retard policy-adjustment rates. In similar contexts, however, others have stressed collective-action and common-pool issues that arise when multiple policymakers share authority over policies. Still others have highlighted bargaining and compromise in policymaking with multiple actors. This paper offers a synthetic discussion of these multifarious effects of the number and diversity of policymaking actors, thereby placing veto-actor considerations in broader theoretical context, and it offers an empirical approach to modeling these manifold effects of multiple policymakers distinctly and effectively. It then offers an initial exploration of this synthetic-theoretical and structured-empirical approach in a study of the evolution of fiscal policy in developed democracies since the 1950s and 1960s.