The Executive Branch in the Interest-Group Theory of Government

Abstract

As the Federalists designed it, there are two ways in which a bill can become a law in U.S. legislatures. Bills become law which obtain a simple majority in both houses of the legislature and the signature of the chief executive, or which obtain two-thirds majorities in both houses without the consent of the chief executive (in both cases bills are subject to judicial review). The economic approach to politics and regulation has made genuine progress in the analysis of various aspects of this legislative process. For example, the legislature and the independent judiciary have been the subjects of a good deal of the recent attention of scholars in this area.' The question, however, of how the agents in the legislative process are interconnected by the rules for passing laws has received only limited attention in the literature. Most particularly, and the issue of concern in this paper, the role of the executive veto in an interest-group theory of government has not been explored. Before turning to our approach of explaining vetoes as a means of enhancing the durability of legislation (by analogy to Landes and Posner's theory of the independent judiciary),2 we will review briefly the field of alternative hypotheses. A primarily theoretical approach to the veto centers around applications of the Shapley-Shubik3 index of voting power. In this approach the voting