The coexistence of strong parties and strong committees in the U.S. Congress has been interpreted in a principal-agent framework with committees regarded as agents of the congressional parties. In a parliamentary system having coalition governments, the coexistence of strong parties and strong committees has a comparable rationale. With data during a 40-year period, the authors showthat the coalition parties in the German parliament distribute committee chair positions so that coalition parties can monitor each other’s cabinet ministers. Such monitoring is an alternative at the legislative level to intracoalition monitoring through the use of junior ministers at the executive level and is a means of enforcing coalition treaties.

Since 1989 six Central and East European countries have held competitive elections under 17 different electoral systems. After some experimentation, the new electoral systems, adopted on the initiative of noncommunist parties, provided for proportional representation, with legal thresholds designed to protect the new parties from smaller, more recent, and more extreme formations. These legal thresholds favored noncommunist parties initially but subsequently appeared to facilitate a return of postcommunist parties to power. A multivariate model of the effect of electoral system thresholds in 13 elections confirms that they contributed to disproportionality but fails to confirm that they consistently favored either former communist or noncommunist parties. Further analysis reveals that legal thresholds have exaggerated the effect of volatility in the electorates on the representation of parties in parliament, causing systems of proportional representation to behave more like single-member plurality systems.

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Systems theorists introduced the concept of ‘support’ to permit explanations of political stability and instability. Yet most attempts to verify the existence of a relationship between support and stability empirically have dealt with wellestablished political systems, and have relied on data collected at one point in time. This paper reports an initial effort to examine the growth of support for a new political regime using a series of sample surveys providing data on changes in the level of support over time.

Comparative legislative research has contributed to an examination of the validity of roll‐call votes as measures of legislators' policy preferences. It has prompted an awareness of the influence of legislative structure on the composition of the voting record. Comparative research on members' ideal points has confronted the problems of selection effects, abstentions, the influence of the agenda setter, and the effect of party strategy. It has encouraged the search for alternate measures of members' preferences, including members' speech, cosponsorship, survey responses, and party manifestos. In the non‐American setting, ideal points have been regarded as group‐level, as well as individual‐level, variables. The game‐theoretic approach to the study of legislatures has led to the formulation of hypotheses relating legislative structure to members' ideal points.