What is vetocracy? Fukuyama's term, Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works and Spain's blocked institutions

Vetocracy is a political system where so many people can say no that the majority can hardly say yes. Courts, second chambers, regions, agencies, interest groups and individual litigants each hold a power to block, and together they make collective decisions slow, expensive or impossible. The word is new, but the experience is familiar to anyone who has waited years for a railway line, a housing permit or the renewal of a public body in Spain.

Where the word comes from

Francis Fukuyama coined it in December 2013, in an essay in The American Interest called "The Decay of American Political Institutions", which previewed his book Political Order and Political Decay. His argument was that the American system of checks and balances, designed to stop the rise of an overly strong executive, had turned into something else in a polarised country. He defined vetocracy as the way those checks make collective decisions based on electoral majorities extremely difficult, because too many actors can veto a decision to solve a problem. He contrasted the United States with Britain, where a parliamentary majority can govern and is then judged at the next election.

The idea has an academic backbone. George Tsebelis, in Veto Players (Princeton University Press), studies political systems by counting the actors whose agreement is needed to change policy. The more veto players there are, and the further apart they stand, the more stable the status quo becomes. Stability sounds like a virtue, and sometimes it is. When the status quo is a housing shortage or a blocked institution, it is the problem.

Dunkelman: how good intentions built the veto

The most widely discussed recent book on the subject is Marc J. Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, published by PublicAffairs in February 2025. Kirkus Reviews read it as a history of how American government lost the ability to get things done.

Dunkelman's story is about the American left, and it travels well. He describes two progressive impulses. One, which he calls Hamiltonian, wants strong central leadership to get things done, today on housing, infrastructure and climate. The other, Jeffersonian, distrusts concentrated power and wants it dispersed and checked. Kirkus sums up the tension well: the two ideals come from very different stories about power. From the Great Society years onwards, Dunkelman argues, the Jeffersonian approach prevailed, and new rules gave citizens, agencies and courts many more ways to stop a project. He tells Yascha Mounk that the prevailing mood within progressivism switched from Hamiltonian to Jeffersonian, and that the perfect became the enemy of the good. His opening example is New York's Penn Station, which everyone agrees is dismal and nobody has been able to rebuild.

His proposed balance is precise. In an interview with The Metropole, speaking about citizen participation, he says the public should get "a voice in the process, but not a veto."

A European case: Spain's judicial council

Europe has its own versions. The clearest Spanish example of the last decade is the General Council of the Judiciary, the CGPJ, which governs the courts and appoints senior judges. Its members' terms expired in December 2018. Their renewal needs three-fifths majorities in both the Congress and the Senate, a rule meant to force consensus between the big parties. In practice it gave the main opposition party a veto, and for more than five years the council carried on with expired mandates. PSOE and PP finally agreed the renewal on 25 June 2024, after five months of negotiations mediated by the European Commission.

The supermajority rule protects something valuable: no single party should be able to pack the judges' governing body. The same rule, with no deadline and no fallback, let one party freeze an institution for years. The check had become a veto.

This matters for this week's subject. At the launch of Democracia 21, Miriam González proposed depoliticising the CGPJ and other oversight bodies. We agree with the aim. A radical-centre version adds one test to every such reform: does it create a new veto, and who can use it?

What a radical-centre answer looks like

The left has good reasons to want vetoes. Participation, judicial review and supermajorities protect minorities, neighbourhoods and the environment against powerful governments and powerful companies. The right and the market-liberal tradition have good reasons to fear them: investment, building and reform need decisions in reasonable time and legal certainty once a decision is taken. Both are describing real goods.

The synthesis is to put a clock on every veto. Consultation stays, with a fixed period. Supermajorities for appointments stay, with a deadline, after which a pre-agreed default applies: a lower majority, a selection by an independent panel, or a draw among qualified candidates. Environmental and planning review stays, with legal time limits and a single procedure in place of overlapping ones. Dunkelman's formula fits: everyone affected gets a voice, and the voice is heard within a known time. Fukuyama's frame explains why: a capable state, the rule of law and accountability have to stay in balance, and a veto with no expiry date tips that balance towards paralysis.

We will come back to this tension all week, because more independent watchdogs, which González rightly wants, can also mean more people able to say no. The answer is to design them so they can check power and still let the country move. Our explainer on Fukuyama's book sets out the frame; today's proposal on oversight bodies applies it.