Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile

This book uses Chile to explore guarantees to authoritarian governments voluntarily ceding power to democratic successors.

John B. Londregan (Author)

9780521037266, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 May 2007

292 pages, 24 b/w illus. 14 tables
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'Londregan's study is pathbreaking in an astonishing number of ways. In the course of demonstrating that Chile's dictatorship established subtle constraints that continue to impinge on the legislative process in democratic Chile, he carries off conceptual and methodological innovations that will shape the way we study legislatures and presidents around the globe. Any remaining barrier between comparative politics, American politics and methodology are shattered by this remarkable study.' Susan Stokes, University of Chicago

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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Ideology and valence
2. Accident and force
3. Legislative institutions in the constitution of 1980
4. Roll-call votes and senate committees
5. The Labor committee
6. The Education committee
7. The Constitution committee
8. Legislative politics and Chile's transition toward democracy
Conclusion
Appendix: estimating preferences from voting records
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political structure & processes [JPH]