In this and the succeeding two chapters, I investigate systematically the voting record of the Russian deputies in order to test the key theoretical components of my account of what went wrong in the Russian legislature. For my explanation to be persuasive, I must show that (1) the structure of deputy preferences and the dimensionality of the policy space differed before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, (2) cycling occurred only after the collapse, and (3) the achievements of Chairman Yeltsin and Chairman Khasbulatov were compatible with the hypothesized differences between the Soviet period parliament and the post-Soviet parliament. I test the first assertion in this chapter, the second assertion in Chapter 7, and the third assertion in Chapter 8.

The first theoretical premise I defend is that the conditions for cycling existed after the collapse of the Soviet Union but not before. In this chapter, I investigate empirically the structure of deputy preferences and the dimensionality of the policy space. If deputies were divided into two grand coalitions whose members had homogeneous preferences, or if the issue space was one-dimensional, cycling could not occur. If deputies were divided into many groups with heterogeneous preferences and if the issue space was multidimensional, cycling could have occurred.