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Although legislative studies is thriving, it suffers from one glaring weakness: a lack of truly comparative, cross-institutional research. Instead, research focuses overwhelmingly on the U.S. Congress. This unfortunate fixation limits the way scholars approach the testing of many compelling theories of legislative organization and behavior, and it ignores the invaluable research possibilities that comparison with the 99 American state legislative chambers offers.

State legislatures are easily compared to Congress: They arise out of the same political culture and history. Their members represent the same parties and face the same voters in the same elections using the same rules. And the functions and roles are the same, with each fully capable of initiating, debating, and passing legislation. None of the methodological problems found when comparing presidential system legislatures with parliamentary system legislatures arise when comparing Congress and the state legislatures.

However, while there are great similarities, there are also important differences that provide scholars leverage for rigorously testing theories. The book compares and contrasts Congress and the state legislatures on histories, fundamental structures, institutional and organizational characteristics, and members. By highlighting the vast array of organizational schemes and behavioral patterns evidenced in state legislatures, the authors demonstrate that the potential for the study of American legislatures, as opposed to the separate efforts of Congressional and state legislative scholars, is too great to leave unexplored.

What might the members of the first Virginia assembly think if they could visit today’s Virginia House of Delegates? The air-conditioning and diversity of the current membership surely would surprise them, but would the legislative process itself strike them as odd? 

In his latest work, Peverill Squire demonstrates that the way the modern legislature goes about its work would seem familiar to visitors from the past. Squire traces a nearly uninterrupted path from that first assembly in Virginia in 1619 to the contemporary Virginia General Assembly, and to the U.S. Congress and the other forty-nine state legislatures. 

Each chapter examines discrete topics rather than historical eras, distinguishing the book from other studies of American legislatures. Topics covered include the fundamentals of legislative structure and operation, how qualification standards for legislative service became more inclusive, and how legislative professionalization unfolded at both congressional and state levels. 

Though covering more than 400 years, Squire manages to present a comprehensive and accessible history of American legislatures that both scholars and students will find valuable.
 

Legislative member organizations (LMOs)—such as caucuses in the U.S. Congress and intergroups in the European Parliament—exist in lawmaking bodies around the world. Unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious, predefined role in the legislative process. They provide legislators with opportunities to establish social networks with colleagues who share common interests. In turn, such networks offer valuable opportunities for the efficient exchange of policy-relevant—and sometimes otherwise unattainable—information between legislative offices. Building on classic insights from the study of social networks, the authors provide a comparative overview of LMOs across advanced, liberal democracies. In two nuanced case studies of LMOs in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the authors rely on a mix of social network analysis, sophisticated statistical methods, and careful qualitative analysis of a large number of in-depth interviews.

Coalition Government, Subnational Style examines parliamentary democracy in subnational legislative assemblies. Comparing three different European democracies—Germany, France, and Belgium—William M. Downs provides a powerful account of the ways politicians and political parties negotiate the composition of new governments following elections in which no single party wins a clear majority.

Downs argues that postelection alliance building is a window onto many of the political processes fundamental to representative democracy: the interpretations of electoral verdicts; the compromises of campaign pledges; the trade-offs between policy and power; the temporary cooperation between long-term adversaries; the collective decision making; and the blurring of lines of accountability through collective responsibility.

The study reports findings from an unprecedented collection of information, including cross-national survey responses, interviews with political elites, and three decades of postelection studies of coalition building in the German state parliaments, the French regional assemblies, and the Belgian provincial councils and regional parliaments. Coalition Government, Subnational Style conclusively demonstrates that the struggles for government status at subnational levels are profoundly important to both parties and voters and that the outcomes of these struggles can result in governments of varying political complexions. Downs's findings question key assumptions of democratic theory and raise important concerns about individual and organizational behavior in changing institutional and electoral environments, ultimately allowing for a deeper understanding of representation, power, and cooperation outside the more familiar arena of national parliamentary politics.

The former Communist countries of Eastern Europe provide a treasure-trove of data on the development of democratic institutions. The contributors to this volume use the recent experiences of these countries to identify how the various committee systems are structured and tie the relative strength of the committee system in each country to the relative strength of its legislature. A uniform theoretical framework connects the work of each essay and ties the parts into an informative whole.

Comparative analysis based on seven indicators of institutionalization suggests that the committee systems of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic are more institutionalized than those found elsewhere. Bulgaria is a middle case, while the parliaments of Moldova, Lithuania, and Estonia are the least. Of the indicators, stability in committee membership and extent of committee activity are among the most important for post-communist parliaments in their first decade.

This examination of legislative committees in their beginning stages suggests that the processes of institutionalization are sequenced: expertise in a policy sector is the basis of both the assertion of jurisdictional autonomy by committees and the motive for party control of their membership and officer positions. Basic to these developments, however, is the emergence of a stable and consistent structure of the committee system as a whole. More broadly, committee attributes are closely linked to the condition and functioning of both parliamentary party groups and the government.

Parliamentary government is generally taken to mean party government. Party cohesion and discipline are usually seen as central to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy. This overlap, between disciplined parties on the one hand and parliamentary government on the other, is often seen as so complete and so automatic that the question of party discipline is pushed to the sidelines and rarely studied. Yet, if individual legislators remain an undisciplined mob, parliaments could easily become unruly and anarchical. 

How and why party discipline arises and is maintained are thus central questions of importance in legislative, and especially parliamentary, studies. Our knowledge of these topics, however, suffers from substantial gaps, especially with regard to the practice of party cohesion outside the relatively familiar Anglo-American setting.

This book marks a step toward filling some of those gaps. The collection of essays presented here provides theoretical background and comparative studies of legislatures in a wide range of settings. Well-developed democracies such as Britain, Finland, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland are covered, as are the more recent democracies of Spain and Hungary, and the unique case of the transnational European Parliament.

The institutional development of American legislatures, beginning with the first colonial assembly of 1619, has been marked by continuity as well as change. Peverill Squire draws upon a wealth of primary sources to document this institutional history. Beginning with the ways in which colonial assemblies followed the precedents of British institutions, Squire traces the fundamental ways they evolved to become distinct. He next charts the formation of the first state legislatures and the Constitutional Congress, describes the creation of territorial and new state legislatures, and examines the institutionalization of state legislatures in the nineteenth century and their professionalization since 1900.

With his conclusion, Squire discusses the historical trajectory of American legislatures and suggests how they might further develop over the coming decades. While Squire's approach will appeal to historians, his focus on the evolution of rules, procedures, and standing committee systems, as well as member salaries, legislative sessions, staff, and facilities, will be valuable to political scientists and legislative scholars.

"The Madisonian Turn is an outstanding assessment of the functioning of democratic institutions in the Nordic countries. If democracy is in trouble in Scandinavia, then it is surely facing problems everywhere, so the book will be read carefully by those concerned about contemporary governance in all modern democracies."
---Michael Gallagher, Trinity College, Dublin

"This welcome and timely re-evaluation of Nordic politics constitutes a major contribution to comparative government, and is likely to stand as the definitive treatment of politics in the region for many years to come."
---Peter Mair, European University Institute

"This book is unique in its comparative scope and the wealth of information on the state of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic countries. It is particularly useful for the comparativists who do not come from these countries, because the original literature which it covers in detail is often not accessible for the English-speaking audience."
---Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Zurich

"The strength of The Madisonian Turn is to interface detailed empirical evidence on the dynamics of democratic politics in Scandinavia with an elaboration and test of rival theories of change in the politics of postindustrial democracies. This book is an inspiration for students of Northern Europe, but also for scholars of comparative legislatures and political parties more generally."
---Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

Parliamentary democracy is the most common regime type in the contemporary political world, but the quality of governance depends on effective parliamentary oversight and strong political parties. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy. In recent years, however, critics have suggested that new challenges such as weakened popular attachment, the advent of cartel parties, the judicialization of politics, and European integration have threatened the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region.

This volume examines these claims and their implications. The authors find that the Nordic states have moved away from their previous resemblance to a Westminster model toward a form of parliamentary democracy with more separation-of-powers features---a Madisonian model. These features are evident both in vertical power relations (e.g., relations with the European Union) and horizontal ones (e.g., increasingly independent courts and central banks). Yet these developments are far from uniform and demonstrate that there may be different responses to the political challenges faced by contemporary Western democracies.

Torbjörn Bergman is Professor of Political Science at Umeå University, Sweden.

Kaare Strøm is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Jacket Credit: Heidi Hobde Dailey

Mexico and the United States each have a constitution and a federal system of government. This fact has led many historians to assume that the Mexican system of government, established in the 1820s, is an imitation of the U.S. model. But it is not.

First published in Spanish in 1955 and now translated by the author and amplified with new material, this interpretation of the independence movement tells the true story of Mexico's transition from colonial status to federal state. Benson traces the Mexican government's beginning to events in Spain in 1808–1810, when provincial juntas, or deputations, were established to oppose Napoleon's French rule and govern the provinces of Spain and its New World dominions during the Spanish monarch's imprisonment.

It was the provincial deputation, not the United States federal system, that provided the model for the state legislative bodies that were eventually formed after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. This finding—the result of years of painstaking archival research—strongly confirms the independence of Mexico's political development from U.S. influence. Its importance to a study of Mexican history cannot be overstated.