Institutions, Veto Players and Policy Change-The Privatization Process of the Telecommunication Sector in Germany and Switzerland

Sammanfattning: Veto player have come to serve as an explanatory fact in the divergence of policy outcomes. Contemporary research on the subject of policy making argues that policy stability is more likely in political settings with multiple veto players, although it restricts a government's ability to push through reforms. The ambition of this thesis is to examine the affect political institutions have on the policy making process. More precisely, it aims to evaluate the explanatory power of the veto player theory as provided by Tsebelis (1995). This thesis reconstructs and discuss the assumptions and predictions of the veto player theory. The method being used is a comparative study. The theory will be tested against the cases of the telecommunication reforms in Germany and Switzerland. In both countries the proposal of a complete privatization of the telecommunication sector been considered, but whereas in Germany (1994), the second post-reform transformed the state monopoly into a private sector Switzerland rejected the same proposal, as late as 2006. Even though the concept of veto player has a central role in explaining policy outcomes, the findings show that the veto player theory is not alone sufficient alone to explain the different policy outcomes in selected cases. The more general critics against the theory derives from how actors endowed with veto power are conceptualized. To strong assumptions on the actors behavior, might result in overlooking potential veto players.