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⁸ See Shugart and Carey, Presidents and Assemblies; Mainwaring and Shugart, Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America.Google Scholar

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³¹ Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 50–3.Google Scholar

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³⁴ For example, in the French system the government determines the parliamentary agenda (John D. Huber, Rationalizing Parliament: Legislative Institutions and Party Politics in France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 27); in Brazil, presidents have a variety of constitutional powers to ensure that their bills take priority (Mainwaring and Shugart, Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America, pp. 64–6).Google Scholar

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⁴⁶ The Moscow-based Centre of Applied Political Research (INDEM) compiled the data-set of votes used in this analysis. INDEM has a database of all the electronically recorded votes in the State Duma. All Duma votes, except secret votes, are electronically recorded. The number of such votes vastly exceeds the small number of ‘roll calls’ that are publicly available from the stenograms of the State Duma.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ These data covered votes on ‘important’ bills: legislation deemed to be particularly consequential at each Duma by commentators at the time and retrospectively. For more detail on the method used, as well as a list of the laws deemed to be important for the years 1994 to July 2001, see Chaisty, Paul and Schleiter, Petra, ‘Productive but Not Valued: The Russian State Duma, 1994–2001’, Europe-Asia Studies, 54: 5 (2002), pp. 701–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These data also included votes that were contentious: roll calls were excluded from the data-set when less than 10 per cent of legislators voted against. Finally, the data-set only included the votes of deputies who were parliamentary party members for the entire period under analysis.

⁴⁸ This index measures the absolute difference between the percentage of aye and nay votes within a party, and produces a cohesion scale from 0 (when a party is evenly divided) to 100 (when party members vote unanimously).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Abstentions and deputies who did not vote were re-coded as nay.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ Paul Chaisty, ‘Majority Control and Executive Dominance: Parliament–President Relations in Putin's Russia’, in Alex Pravda (ed.), Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 125.Google Scholar

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⁵⁶ See Chaisty, Legislative Politics and Economic Power in Russia, pp. 83–5.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ In the Second Duma, for example, the Communist Party permitted a number of its deputies to join two deputy groups: the Agrarian Deputy Group and Popular Power. By sponsoring the formation of these groups, the party gained their support in the Duma Council.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ See ‘Novye deputaty po novym pravilam’, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 20 May 2005. In previous Dumas, one half of the assembly (225 deputies) was elected in plurality contests, and the remainder were elected from the lists of parties that received 5 per cent or more of the national ballot (225).Google Scholar

⁵⁹ See Ol’ga Redichkina, ‘Vyshel iz partii – sdai’, Gazeta, 29 June 2006, p. 2.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Other changes included: raising the electoral threshold for parties from 5 to 7 per cent; tighter rules on the method for registering parties; and amendments to the law ‘On Extremism’, which empowers the authorities to disqualify parties that use (or whose members use) xenophobic rhetoric during election campaigns. See ‘Tema dnya vybory. Izbiratel’nyi ekstremizm’, Kommersant Daily, 16 June 2006, p. 8; Ivan Rodin, ‘Effekt “bumeranga” ’, Nezavismaya gazeta, 23 November 2006, p. 1.Google Scholar

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⁶⁵ These are in contrast to the first, second and third readings of bills, which take place on the floor of the Duma.Google Scholar

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⁶⁸ http://www.duma.gov.ru/.Google Scholar

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⁷¹ See Chaisty, ‘Majority Control and Executive Dominance’, p. 134.Google Scholar

⁷² This law replaced a number of Soviet-era social benefits with cash payments. These benefits included free public transport and medicine.Google Scholar

⁷³ Important bills that were already in the legislative process from previous Dumas were excluded from the data-set. Budget bills were also excluded because of their fixed annual cycle.Google Scholar

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⁷⁷ See Richard Rose, ‘How Floating Parties Frustrate Democratic Accountability: A Supply-Side View of Russia's Elections’, in Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 235–46.Google Scholar

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