Veto player theory has become a major approach to the study of policy change. Assessing the theory’s usefulness is rather demanding, requiring the identification of significant policy changes, the relevant veto players and their policy preferences. This has only rarely been achieved for domestic environmental policy – a field that is moreover subject to supranational and international cooperation.
The present study improves on previous efforts in two important ways. First, we use a new and comprehensive dataset measuring changes to environmental policy in 24 OECD and transition countries between 1970 and 2005 on four dimensions: 1) adoption of new policies, 2) pure legislative (parliamentary) outputs, 3) combined legislative and executive outputs (including e.g. governmental decrees), and 4) changes in the direction and magnitude of instrument settings, e.g. limit values on pollutants. Second, we study the impact of veto players in terms of both their number and their environmental policy positions.
