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.

'Londregan's book poses a powerful question: to what extent does a quasi-democratic constitution crafted by a military government constrain a liberal electorate from enacting laws consistent with their preferences? In answering this question, Londregan combines state-of-the-art methodology with a deep understanding of the Chilean case. The scintillating analysis of legislative politics in the final chapter is proof positive that high-tech statistical methods are a tool, not a barrier, to compelling narrative. I recommend this book to all comparativists.'

David Latin - Stanford University

'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