Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

SAGETRACK

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Party Politics
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Thames, F. C.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Discipline and Party Institutionalization in Post-Soviet Legislatures

Frank C. Thames

Texas Tech University, Department of Political Science, Box 4104, Lubbock, TX 79409-1015, USA, frank.thames{at}ttu.edu

Fearing that weak or poorly institutionalized party systems may undermine democratic consolidation, scholars have examined party systems in a myriad of contexts. The vast majority of these studies utilize aggregate measures of party system institutionalization to assess the relative merits of individual systems. While laudable, relying on aggregate measures may obscure the effects of the variation in party institutionalization in different systems. This article examines legislative politics in postCommunist Russia and Ukraine to determine whether variation in party institutionalization, even in weakly institutionalized party systems, has significant effects. The empirical results show that variation in party institutionalization creates variation in levels of parliamentary party discipline in both contexts. This raises the possibility that systemic level analyses of party system institutionalization are ignoring the effects of within-system variation.

Key Words: institutionalization • legislature • political party • Russia • Ukraine

Party Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4, 456-477 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1354068807077956
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?