Replication data for: Legislative instability: The dynamics of agenda control in the Russian Parliament 1990-1993

Using social choice theory, I argue that the confrontation between Russia's President and its parliament, which led to the collapse of the first democratically elected Russian national legislature since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was the result of poor institutional design and internal instability within the Russian legislature. Due to an increase in the number of issue dimensions along with the presence of only weakly developed institutional features, such as committees, a specific kind of instability, known as cycling, existed in the Parliament after the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to Richard McKelvey (1976), when outcomes cycle due to shifting majority coalitions, a person with the power to set the legislative agenda can dominate legislative outcomes. I argue that after t he collapse of the Soviet Union, the chairman of the parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, had the power to set the legislative agenda and so was able to use the Parliament as a platform from which to engage the President in a struggle for control of Russia. Using the linear factor model recommended by James Heckman and James Snyder (1996), I estimate the ideal points of deputies both before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I operationalize Norman Schofield's model of a cycle set (1993) and demonstrate that cycling occurred during the first few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Further evidence from the roll call analysis supports my theory that Chairman Khasbulatov was able to achieve his own most-preferred legisl ative outcomes several months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggesting that he benefited from the presence of cycling, just as the positive theory of legislative institutions predicts. Not only does this study identify cycling in an important institutional setting--the Russian national legislature--it shows that poor institutional design has important consequences for the consolidation of democracy in transitional countries.