This is a new assessment of the new parliaments that emerged as communism collapsed. The sudden fall of the Soviet bloc stimulated both the rapid emergence of fledgling democracies and scholarly attention to the post-communist transition. The editors of this new volume characterize the newly democratized parliaments as "parliaments in adolescence" in their initial assessment (1966). They now face the challenge of chronicling the trajectory of these young democratic parliaments. Whether they survive or not into the third decade, this new text is a critical benchmark in understanding their fates. This book modifies the usual organizational pattern of chapters concentrating on specific countries by the addition of three comparative chapters to complement the concluding one. The concluding chapter compares the post-communist parliaments with the presumptively more established west European parliaments. This book will bridge the usual gap in research between the post-communist parliaments and more "normal" democratic parliaments to develop a common legislative research perspective on both new and established parliaments.This book was published as a special issue of the leading "Journal of Legislative Studies.
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