Good Question

A student has asked a good question. I have posted it with my answer in bold face.

"I am having trouble distinguishing between the different principles. When looking over the review of Wed and the end of chapter 6 page 264-there is a table, they are all similar and seem to apply to all categories."

You are right, they all apply to some degree. I am so glad that you have noticed this. I have been wondering when someone was going to notice this.

It is not a problem that they apply to the same case. You do want to keep them analytically distinct, but they can all apply to the same phenomenon.

For example, if you want to explain the temperature o the Earth some of the processes are from Chemistry, some from physics, some affect temperature in one direction, some in another. Likewise, if you want to explain the policy of a country, some of the explanation comes from economics (rationality) some from psychology (institutions) some from History (path dependency).

It is fine if they overlap in a particular case, what you want to avoid is allowing their definitions to overlap (though, with our text, they are defined in such a loose way that that, too, sometimes happens).

"The presidents use or non-use of a veto for example.
Rationally, the veto is carefully used in order to weigh the disadvatages and advantages."

Yes.

Note how rationality is a matter of weighing the costs and benefits in the future of your next move. The other principles sort of provide the rules of the game in which you rationally calculate your next move.

"Collective action, the veto is part of the bargaining between the president and congress."

Ok, the Congress is a group that is trying to act. But I am not sure that is a really interesting application of the concept.

To show it is a collective action problem you need to show how the incentives of the individual member of Congress differ from the interests of Congress as a whole. For instance, for the Congress as a whole, they might prefer the policy they passed, but each individual Congressman might have an incentive to ‘defect,’ as it were, to get into the good graces of the President.

Standing up to the President is like getting the swamp drained, but not voting against the president is like getting the swamp drained for free.

"Institution principle, veto power makes the president the most important single legislative leader."

I suppose, but this is using the word institution in its non-specialized sense. I think this distribution of decision making power among the various actors is more a matter of the policy principle.

The more important sense of ‘institutions’ in political science, of an informal convention about roles and prerogatives in decision making, would really come into play in how the president’s veto power is informally and conventionally understood. Before Jackson, Presidents thought they could only veto bills if they believed they were unconstitutional. Just vetoing something because you thought it was a bad idea was, well, kind of like not shaking hands with someone—something you might get away with but that would be considered out of line.

Another way the institutional principle might come into play is in the presidency as an institution, a collective personality with a memory and set of interests going beyond its current occupant. So presidents might decide to veto a bill not because they oppose it on policy grounds but because it takes power away from or otherwise reduces the prerogatives of the Presidency itself.

The current flap over the NSA wire tapping is driven largely by this sort of institutional competition. Congress and the president largely agree (or at least did agree) on the kind of program they want the NSA to conduct, but the President still threatens a veto. Why? Because signing a bill from Congress that gives him the power to order such foreign policy wiretaps would imply that the Presidency didn’t have the power in the first place and that, therefore, the Congress could at some point take the power away.


"Policy, congress changes bill content so the president wont veto."

Yes.

"History, the presidents history of vetoing can affect the bills passed now."

An even bigger yes.

Notice how this is a little different from the simple calculation of current costs and benefits implied by rationality. Here we have to weigh not just the policy outcome but the ‘reputational’ outcome of the veto decision.

You might veto a bill whose costs outweighed its benefits in order to establish a reputation for the future, perhaps because you have an unfortunate history of not vetoing enough to make your vetoes credible.

Or, conversely, a President with a reputation for vetoing bills he doesn’t like and effectively punishing Congressmen that try to pass things even though the President has signaled his intention to veto, may not have to use the veto in the first place. Why? Because Congress calculates it is too risky to pass the bill to begin with.