M. Steven Fish

Steve Fish is a comparative political scientist who studies democracy and regime change in developing and postcommunist countries, religion and politics, and constitutional systems and national legislatures. He is author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge, 2005), which was the recipient of the Best Book Award of 2006, presented by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association, and Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1995). He is coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey (Cambridge, 2009) and Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton, 2001). His articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Post-Soviet Affairs, and other journals. He served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia, in 2007 and at the European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2000-2001. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Social Sciences Teaching Award of the Colleges of Letters and Science, University of California-Berkeley.

“…an impressive undertaking, genuinely novel in its conception, and remarkably broad in scope.”
---John Carey, Dartmouth College

“…a signal achievement…a valuable cross-national index of parliamentary powers and an authoritative reference guide to each of the world's major national legislatures.”
---Thomas F. Remington, Emory University

“…a unique volume of enormous importance in its contribution to the creation of rich and truly comparative data on the formal and informal power of national legislatures across the world. This book is destined to become a chief source for many important contributions in the future.”
---Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Florida

Data from the Handbook of National Legislatures

• Parliamentary Powers Index Scores
• Parliamentary Powers Index Data
• Parliamentary Powers Index Codebook

"This is an important work, and should be read both by Russia specialists and those interested in comparative democratization. It is very well written and its presentation is easy to follow, making it amenable for undergraduate course use as well. With this book, Fish has raised the bar for future work on Russian politics."
---Perspectives on Politics

"All serious scholars of contemporary Russia should engage with what Fish has written here, in what is undoubtedly one of the book books on Russia today." ---International Affairs

"A theoretically sophisticated, original, and convincing account of the emergence of the democratic opposition in the Gorbachev period and after, and the reasons for its continuing weakness, Democracy from Scratch is one of the most important contributions to the political science of the new Russia yet published. It questions much conventional wisdom and should reshape important debates."
---Europe-Asia Studies