In 1987, in a conversation with a visiting government delegation from Yugoslavia, Deng Xiaoping gave the following assessment on Chinese economic reforms:

This is a powerful insight into both the success and the limitations of China's economic reform. The biggest success of the reform is to have allowed a substantial degree of flexibility in an otherwise rigid and statist economic system. This flexibility gave an opportunity to innovative and hard-working entrepreneurs to create and expand businesses, which over time would eclipse China's inefficient and wasteful state sector. Some of the specific economic policies and reform measures have also been important. These would include price liberalization, opening up the country to FDI and overseas export markets, creation of central banking and tax institutions essential to a functioning market economy, and a gradual emergence of rule-leaning, though not yet rule-based, governmental interventions in the economy and business-government relationships. These policy measures have led to macro stability, elimination of shortages, and abatement of anticompetitive barriers, all very impressive achievements during a short period of time.

Working within the framework of rational choice theory, scholars have found that certain features of legislatures reduce the likelihood of cycling. In particular, “[i]n legislative settings, the answers invariably center on committees and rules” (Krehbiel 1991, p. 32). Shepsle's 1979 study was the first in a series of studies of the U.S. Congress that investigate how institutional design – the rules governing the legislative process – prevents cycling and enables a legislature to enact coherent and stable policies. At the end of over a decade of research, it was common to refer to a “textbook” Congress, a stable legislature dominated by committees and characterized by its rules (Shepsle and Weingast 1995, p. 3).

The argument of this book hinges on the implications of changes in the organization of deputy preferences; the reason that everything depends on deputy preferences is because at no time was the institutional design of the Russian Parliament sufficient to prevent cycling. In this chapter, I explore the most important rules of procedure, those that affected how the legislature made its decisions.

COMMITTEES AND PRESIDIUM IN THE RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT

The Russian Parliament inherited several features from its predecessor, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic, the most significant of which were a jurisdiction-based committee system and a central organizing body known as the Presidium. Before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced competitive elections to the Soviet Union, the Russian Supreme Soviet was a rubber-stamp institution that met rarely and, when it did, was dominated by its Presidium.

Recent history has shown that it is not easy for a new democracy to adopt its first constitution. Many post-communist countries struggled to pass new constitutions, limping along for years under amended versions of communist-era documents. Russia was no exception. Until Russia's President in the fall of 1993 used his powers of decree to disband the existing legislative institutions and call for a national referendum on a new constitution, Russia was mired in a constitutional impasse. Russia's constitutional crisis lasted almost two years (1992–1993), not long among post-communist transitions. Yet, unlike most other post-communist cases, its resolution was not the result of negotiation and compromise but of violence and armed confrontation.

Yeltsin's draconian solution to the constitutional crisis was a pivotal moment in the brief history of Russian democracy. Few of Yeltsin's supporters and none of his opponents would forget the haunting image of presidential troops firing on deputies holed up in the parliament building. Many lamented the harm that Yeltsin's precipitous and unconstitutional actions did to democratic reform. Even members of Yeltsin's closest circle of advisors criticized the strong presidential republic that Yeltsin's constitution created.

The constitutional crisis began with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. At that time, according to Russia's existing constitution, only the legislative branch of government had the authority to adopt a new constitution. Russia's two-tiered legislative structure included the large and ceremonial Congress of People's Deputies and the much smaller functional parliament (the Supreme Soviet).

In Chapters 5 and 6, I present empirical evidence to show that there were important differences in the structure of deputy preferences before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Chapter 7, I present evidence to show how differences in the structure of deputy preferences led to differences in the nature of majority rule after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the one-dimensional world that existed before the collapse, majority rule was well behaved; that is, outcomes did not cycle, and the chairman was constrained by the existence of a stable majority. In the multidimensional world that existed after the collapse, majority rule was not well-behaved; that is, either outcomes cycled (as they did in Session 4) or unstable majorities were susceptible to manipulation by the chairman.

In this chapter, I complete my empirical case by investigating how the nature of majority rule affected the behavior of the two chairmen. I hypothesize that before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the issue space was one-dimensional, the presence of a stable majority limited what Yeltsin could achieve. After the collapse, when the issue space was multidimensional, the absence of a stable majority provided Khasbulatov with the opportunity to achieve his most desirable outcome.

To understand how majority cycles undermine legislative decision making, it is necessary to understand the theoretical concept of cycling. Therefore, I begin this chapter with an exposition of a precise definition of cycling and its consequences. Following this, I discuss the most important solutions to cycling that have been developed by formal scholars of legislatures. The earliest studies, beginning with Kenneth Shepsle's path-breaking article (Shepsle 1979), focus on how institutional design in the form of committees and rules can prevent cycling. More recent studies – in particular, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins' influential book – analyze how political parties, in conjunction with committees and rules, prevent cycling (Cox and McCubbins 1993). Following Cox and McCubbins, John Aldrich shows formally how, in a two-party setting, institutional design and the organization of preferences work together to prevent cycling (Aldrich 1995a). In a multiparty setting, work by Schofield (Schofield 1993) shows how the ideological location of parties, even highly organized parties, cannot prevent cycling if the issue space is multidimensional and parties can be differentiated along more than one of the dimensions. Therefore, in multiparty settings, committees and rules are critical to preventing a breakdown in majority rule.

CYCLING: DEFINITION AND DISCUSSION

Kenneth Arrow first showed that it is generally impossible to amalgamate individual preferences in a “fair” manner such that a consistent and stable social preference is established (Arrow 1963).

In the spring of 1992, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, deputies in the Russian Parliament struggled to create a constitution that would lay the foundations for a new democratic state, the Russian Federation. For the first time in Russia's long history, the country's elected representatives sought to establish a basis for the rule of law, defense of basic human rights, and the means to foster a market economy. Once the deputies had given their initial approval of the draft prepared by the special constitutional commission (which occurred by majority vote on March 19), they began discussion of each of the draft's six chapters. Their goal was to forward a final version of the draft constitution to the Congress of People's Deputies, a superlegislative body that alone had the authority to adopt a new constitution.

Discussion of the draft's six chapters began on March 25. On that day, parliamentary deputies discussed and approved the constitution's first chapter, “Principles of the Constitutional Order,” in which the basic provisions of the constitution were outlined. The next day, March 26, the deputies began discussing the draft constitution's second chapter, which concerned “The Basic Rights, Freedoms, and Responsibilities of the Individual Citizen.” Over the course of the day's debate, deputies amended the draft chapter nine times. At the end of the day, according to parliamentary procedure, deputies were asked to approve the final version of the draft.

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.

Essentially, I begin the book in Chapter 2 with a case study of the most important example of cycling in the Russian Parliament, the cyclical debate on the new Russian constitution. In my story, I emphasize just how seriously cycling disrupted debate on the constitution. Furthermore, I describe how it enabled the chairman to manipulate the agenda, using the problematic constitutional issue to keep deputies focused on reducing the powers of the executive branch. From this story, we know that cycling did occur in the Russian Parliament and that it occurred at precisely that moment when conditions in the parliament conformed to the conditions outlined by formal theory: Deputies were making complex choices involving several policy dimensions at once (i.e., the issue space was multidimensional), the number of partisan groups was large (greater than two), and legislative institutions (such as committees) were weak. The story in Chapter 2 also demonstrates that the impact of cycling was not trivial. It affected the legislature's ability to make collective decisions. It allowed the chairman to monopolize the agenda and thus keep the legislature focused on a power struggle with the executive branch, which in turn reduced the ability of either institution to function. Ultimately, cycling affected Russia's choice of constitutional system.

That said, we still do not know the answers to several questions. Was the cyclical debate on the draft constitution an isolated occurrence, or was the problem of cycling more extensive? Did cycling occur in sessions other than Session 4?

When I began the project that led to this book, my primary motivation was to answer two seemingly unrelated questions: (1) Why did Russia's first competitively elected legislature become embroiled in a confrontation with the Russian president that led ultimately to its own demise? (2) Is cycling an empirical phenomenon that bears on transitional democracies?

As a student of Russian politics, I found the first question puzzling. Because the Russian legislature lost its confrontation with President Yeltsin – after all, the president disbanded the legislature on September 22, 1993, and all the legislative members lost their jobs – it is hard to make sense of the parliament's yearlong preoccupation with reducing executive power. During 1993, the country's economy continued to shrink, organized crime increased, and much of the military went unpaid. In short, there were many problems facing the new democracy, but the country's representative institution ignored these problems and did its best to prevent the president from attending to them as well. Even stranger, when given the opportunity to pass a new constitution that would have preserved their own jobs as well as strengthen the powers of the legislature vis-à-vis the executive branch, the parliament in conjunction with the Congress could not do so.

As a student of legislatures, I felt that the second question represented a gaping hole in the formal theory of legislatures. The phenomenon of cycling is of central theoretical importance to formal scholars of legislatures.

In the first two chapters, I argue that changes in the structure of deputy preferences transformed the Russian Parliament from a purposive vehicle for political and economic reform into the obedient dupe of an ambitious politician. As the key to why Russia's transitional parliament failed as a democratic, representative institution, it is important to investigate the origins of deputies' preferences as well as how and why they changed.

Philosophers and scholars have focused on two possible sources of the preferences of elected representatives; either the preferences of deputies reflect their ideology or they reflect the collective desires of the constituents who elected them. As philosophers and scholars have noted, either alternative has important implications for the meaning of representative democracy (Burke 1774; Fenno 1973, 1978). It seems likely that the preferences of deputies consist of a combination of (a) personal ideology and (b) attentiveness to constituent demands, and that these will exert greater or lesser influence depending on the strength of the deputy's personal ideology (Budge 1994; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001) and the strength of the electoral connection (Mayhew 1974, Fiorina 1977, Strom 1990). In stable, long-lived democracies, in which elections to the national legislature have been held for decades or even generations, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives is strong. Voters reelect candidates who successfully represent their interests, and they reject candidates who do not (Fiorina 1981).