Post Communist Parliaments

The sudden collapse of communism stimulated both the rapid emergence of fledgling democracies and scholarly attention to the post-communist transition. The editors of this proposed volume characterized the newly democratized parliaments as "parliaments in adolescence" in our initial assessment (1966). We now have the opportunity and also challenge, a decade later, to chronicle and to review the trajectory of beginning democratic parliaments. Whether they survive or not into the third decade, the proposed book will be a critical benchmark in understanding their fates. We include five parliaments which exemplify the wide range of developments in the new post-communist political systems, from the stable consolidated democracies to the less stable and more authoritarian states, within which their respective parliaments function. This book will modify the usual organizational pattern of chapters concentrating on specific countries by the addition of three comparative chapters to complement our concluding one. The concluding chapter will compare the post-communist parliaments with the presumptively more established west European parliaments. This book will bridge the usual gap in research between the post-communist parliaments and more "normal" democratic parliaments to develop a common legislative research perspective on both new and established parliaments. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.POSTCOMM is the author of 'Post Communist Parliaments' with ISBN 9780415365574 and ISBN 0415365570.