Institutional design and legislative behavior: A comparative analysis of post-Soviet legislatures in Russia and Estonia

Can effective legislatures be designed when political parties are weak and fragmented, or even absent? This is one dilemma facing new or newly-independent states, such as those of the former Soviet Union. This dissertation develops a comparative institutional framework for studying new legislatures, and explores the consequences different institutional designs hold for the ability of such legislatures to manage legislative and political conflict. The central dilemma when designing new legislatures is how to balance partisan entities, such as parties or factions, with legislative committees. Parties and committees constitute alternative modes of organization and channels for participation for the members of a legislature. How they are balanced in a legislature's institutional design defines the space within which legislators may exercise individual discretion, and thus determines the extent to which the members are constrained to pursue cooperative and consensus-building strategies, on the one hand, or are free to pursue competitive or confrontational strategies on the other.;The exclusion of parties in the Russian Supreme Soviet facilitated internal consensus-building on legislation, by depoliticizing the legislative process. But it denied that legislature institutionally-based means for managing broader political conflict, and the ensuing deadlock with the executive branch culminated in the Supreme Soviet's spectacular demise. The new State Duma's unlinked, dual-channel design includes partisan factions, providing it with the ability to manage political conflict with the executive branch. But those factions have been included in a way that undermines the Duma's ability to reach internal consensus on legislation, with frequent internal breakdown and deadlock the result. The Estonian legislature's linked, dual-channel design, by contrast, incorporates parties in a way that maximizes its internal and external consensus-building capabilities on both legislative and broad political issues. It therefore offers clues to how new states, or states undergoing democratic transformation, may best include nascent parties in their legislatures.;This dissertation uses participant observation, in-depth interviews, voting records, and case studies of the budget process in these three legislatures to examine the effects of institutional design on a legislature's ability to manage conflict and produce legislative and broader political consensus both internally, and in relations with the executive branch.