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Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change. Dueto the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence aboutgovernments’ ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single-country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policyareas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reformmeasures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western Europeancountries from the mid-1980s until the mid-2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model withother central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis-driven policychange) and partisan theory (ideology-driven policy change). Robust support is found that governmentsintroduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positionedfurther away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theoryin its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings providesupport for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support ofall government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversizedcabinets) for policy change.In particular,it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distancebetween the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government’s ability to introducereforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies andhighlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.
