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Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The "building materials" out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.

This paper shows that agnostic spatial models that simultaneously attempt to estimate legislators' preferred points and ideological locations for the proposals on which they vote, such as the well-known NOMINATE model of Poole and Rosenthal, are not identified. The problem arises because the agnostic estimators inherit the granularity of the voting data and, so, cannot recapture the underlying continuous parameter space. I propose an alternative estimator that achieves identification by modeling the agenda.

King (1989) presented the "Generalized Event Count" (GEC) model as a means of dealing with event count data when the analyst is unsure whether the data are "underdispersed" or "overdispersed." Here I establish several useful properties of the GEC model and make some practical suggestions for estimation.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen several authoritarian governments voluntarily cede power to constitutionally elected democratic governments. John Londregan uses Chile as a case study of this phenomenon, exploring what sorts of guarantees are required for those who are ceding power and how those guarantees later work out in practice. He constructs an analytical model of a democratic transition and provides a new statistical technique for analysing legislative votes, based upon a detailed empirical analysis of Chile's legislative politics. Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile extends existing spatial models of policy preferences by incorporating a valence component to policy choices. The valence component enables an agenda setter, in Chile the democratically elected president, to overcome veto players' objections to reform. Londregan specifically also uses Senate committee voting records to study the impact of human rights concessions on the political debate

The political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way, namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses. We find that a dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome. To achieve economically efficient outcomes, it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices not be given offsetting transfers. But the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics, which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market. We identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics and are therefore immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices.