Career
He is currently a professor at the University of Michigan. He received undergraduate degrees in engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and in political science from Sciences Po. He received a doctorate in mathematical statistics from Pierre and Marie Curie University and one in political science from Washington University in Saint Louis.
Tsebelis developed the theory of "veto players", set out in his best known work, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (2002)
The ‘veto players’ concept is an old one, dating back at least 2000 years.
Tsebelis synthesises and formalizes lieutenant A ‘veto player’ is an individual or collective actor who has to agree for the legislative status quo to change.
Tsebelis argues that having many veto players makes significant policy changes difficult or impossible. Tsebelis also predicts that systems with a high number of veto players will pass few significant laws and will tend to high deficits (as the veto players need to be bought off).
Some of these veto players, moreover, can present ‘take it or leave it’ proposals to the other veto players.
Tsebelis calls these ‘agenda setters’. According to Tsebelis, among feasible outcomes (that is, the shared winset of outcomes which meet each veto player’s requirement of being superior to the status quo), agenda setters pick the outcome that they like most. Tsebelis predicts that when few outcomes are feasible, agenda setters will have a small role.
Where none at all are possible (that is, there is no ‘core’ where all winsets overlap), agenda setters are irrelevant.
