Regieren unter den Bedingungen des institutionellen Pluralismus: ein deutsch-amerikanischer Vergleich

Within the discipline of comparative politics, Western democracies have been categorized according to the number of veto-players or ‘co-governing actors’ governments face when pursuing their programmes. Often, potential veto-players have been treated as rather static factors with a focus on their maximum veto potential. In this article, devoted to studying the conditions of governing in the United States and Germany, veto-players are explicitly considered as dynamic actors, which allows much more realistic assessments of the conditions of governing in highly power-sharing systems. In fact, under certain conditions some veto-players may ease rather than complicate the task of governing. Moreover, the fundamental difference between parliamentarism and presidentialism is being highligthed as a key variable shaping the functioning of seemingly similar institutional arrangements in liberal democracies.