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Abstract
Constitutional courts and referenda are increasingly significant actors in European politics. As unelected elements of representative democracies, constitutional courts and referenda perform similar roles in the evaluation and validation of legislative action. They also play important roles in arbitrating disputes between governments and their opponents. However, the role that these institutions play in domestic legislative bargaining remains largely understudied.
In fact, to the limited extent that existing models of legislative bargaining incorporate constitutional courts and referenda, they treat them as functional substitutes for additional legislative chambers (Tsebelis 2002; Tsebelis and Hug 2002; Riker 1982, 1992; Stone-Sweet 1992, 2000). Building on existing game theoretic and experimental studies of arbitration, this dissertation provides a way to model the unique evaluative role that constitutional courts and referenda play in the process of legislative consensus formation. As a result, this research supplements the existing theoretical literature by developing a new type of legislative veto authority - arbitral veto authority.
In addition to presenting general models of arbitral veto authority, a framework for comparative case study analysis is constructed. A qualitative analysis of the effects of variations in arbitral veto type on patterns of legislative consensus formation is conducted in the Swiss and Hungarian cases. Overall, this dissertation concludes that conceptualizing some types of constitutional courts and referenda as arbitral veto authorities illuminates institutional determinants of elite conflict and cooperation that have been systematically discounted by previous studies.
