This article draws several conclusions. First, that elections provide critical information for shaping behavior, since in the second and third rounds, party elites and voters behaved in ways that were rational considering the outcome of the previous election. Second, on the whole, states have adopted a variety of systems and rarely changed them in major ways after the second round of elections, indicating that electoral systems quickly become constraining institutions. Where they have been changed, movement has been away from the extremes of either high disproportionality or proportionality. Third, results from the first three rounds of elections indicate declines in party system fragmentation, disproportionality, volatility, and wasted votes, indicating a growth in strategic voting. Finally, except in the very important case of party volatility, and Russia, the view that there is a generalized gap between the post-Soviet cases and the East European cases is not supported by the evidence.While the collapse of communism was heralded as a triumph for liberal democracy, there has been considerably less optimism about the actual process for translating popular will into coherent governance. Throughout the 1990s, there was fear that the presumed disappearance of the communist parties would be replaced by inchoate party systems filled with ephemeral movements reflecting unclear interests and reemerging ethnic identities (Bunce and

The old order of stable political alignments within and between the Soviet republics and their nationalities disintegrated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia and the fourteen new states on its borders must now deal with a new and unpredictable international environment even as they struggle with political and economic chaos at home. Russia and the New States of Eurasia, first published in 1994, focuses on the central role of Russia in this new world and surveys the possibilities for future alignments both among the new states, and between the new states and their neighbours. It identifies the key issues and relationships which will determine the long-term economic growth and political stability of this vast and vital region, and will prove essential reading for students, scholars and policy-makers concerned with the future of the former Soviet Union.

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