How Do Political Institutions Work? Structuring Intertemporal Interactions

This paper presents an approach to study the effects of political institutions on policies, which puts emphasis on the intertemporal nature of policymaking. We argue that viewing political institutions from the perspective of their effects on intertemporal interactions and intertemporal cooperation can lead to predictions different from those emerging from views that do not emphasize such dimensions. We illustrate this point by contrasting predictions from an intertemporal framework with predictions from veto player approaches, and we provide evidence supporting our argument. In particular, increasing the number of veto players does not necessarily make a polity less able to change policies