Gubernatorial Veto Powers and the Size of Legislative Coalitions

• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Author: Jon C. Rogowski,Josh M. Ryan,Robert J. McGrath
• Date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12089

ROBERT J. McGRATH

George Mason University

JON C. ROGOWSKI

Washington University in St. Louis

JOSH M. RYAN

Utah State University

Gubernatorial Veto Powers and

the Size of Legislative Coalitions

Few political institutions are as central to theories of lawmaking as the executive

veto. Despite its importance, institutional continuity at the national level has precluded

identification of empirical effects of the veto on legislative behavior. We address this

limitation and present evidence from the states demonstrating how the veto affects the

formation of legislative coalitions and, indirectly, executive influence over policymak-

ing. We find consistent evidence that the presence and strength of gubernatorial veto

powers affect the lawmaking behavior of state legislatures. Our analysis shows how

institutional provisions condition executives’ ability to affect policy outcomes in

separation-of-powers systems.

Following Alexander Hamilton’s insistence in Federalist 73 that

the presidential veto would guard against the tendency of the legislature

to “invade the rights of the executive,” the veto is the key mechanism

supporting policy bargaining between the president and Congress

(Cameron 2000; McCarty 2000). Veto power helps presidents and gov-

ernors extract policy concessions from their legislatures by providing a

constraint on the enactment of legislation.

The framers of the federal Constitution had a keen intuition for

how their specif‌ic grant of veto power (with a two-thirds override

requirement, per Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution) would

empower the president. Likewise, architects of state constitutions f‌irst

clashed over the mere existence of the veto, then came to different and

varying provisions of veto power than that given to the president. These

practitioners of institutional design had different preferences regarding

the balance of power between the branches and used veto rules to solid-

ify these preferences. Recent research in political science (e.g., Brady

and Volden 1998; Krehbiel 1998) has systematized the intuitions of these

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 4, November 2015 571

DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12089

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C2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

early institutionalists. We build on this work and argue that veto override

requirements structure the incentives for legislatures to build coalitions

of particular sizes. In particular, when legislatures and executives dis-

agree, larger override requirements mandate legislatures to assemble

larger coalitions so that they can enact policy over a potential veto.

Obviously, such claims are impossible to assess at the federal level,

as the veto has been available to all presidents, and the number of legisla-

tors necessary to override a veto has remained constant across American

history (Cameron 2009).

1

Yet, override requirements do vary across the

US states, providing a set of institutional contexts in which to study how

the particulars of the executive veto can affect the nature of lawmaking.

We thus contribute to a growing literature that uses variation across and

within the states to examine how institutional design and sources of

gubernatorial inf‌luence affect important political outcomes (e.g., Alt and

Lowry 1994; Gordon and Huber 2007; Huber and Shipan 2002; Lax and

Phillips 2009, 2012; Wright and Schaffner 2002). In particular, we argue

that the veto affords gubernatorial power insofar as it advantages super-

majoritarian pivots in state legislatures that may be more amenable to the

governor’s preferences than the median. Without the veto, simple

majority-sized coalitions would be able to pass policy over the objec-

tions of a relatively toothless governor. Furthermore, more onerous

supermajoritarian requirements should increase legislative coalition sizes

and thus the potential for gubernatorial inf‌luence.

We assess this basic argument with two complementary analyses.

First, we examine the introduction of the veto in North Carolina in 1997

as a quantitative case study of how the existence of the veto can affect

coalition sizes. Comparing voting patterns in the 1995–1996 General

Assembly to those in the 1997–1998 session, we f‌ind that legislative

coalitions were larger in both the upper and lower chambers upon the

introduction of the veto. Second, leveraging cross-sectional variation in

states’ veto override requirements, we examine how the nature of these

requirements affects the size of legislative coalitions in state chambers

during the 1999–2000 session. We f‌ind that legislative coalitions are

larger in states with greater override requirements. We conclude by dis-

cussing the implications of our f‌indings for interbranch bargaining and

executive power, stressing the connection between coalition sizes and

lawmaking across the states.

Our f‌indings shed light on why reformers of state institutions are

increasingly interested in the balances of power between state executives

and legislatures. In just the past two years, Alabama has considered

increasing its veto override threshold,

2

and Illinois reformers (including

the Republican candidate for governor) qualif‌ied a constitutional

572 Robert J. McGrath, Jon C. Rogowski, and Josh M. Ryan