Communist legislatures have not normally been taken seriously by Westerners, who tend to see them as passive instruments of the Party, playing little part in the political life of their countries. The contributors to this volume, a group of specialists in communist politics drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, take issue with this view.

The chapters of this cross-national study contain thoroughly researched and up-to-date studies of communist legislatures chosen to represent the most important sub-types: Yugoslavia (Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University, Canada), Poland (David M. Olson and Maurice D. Simon, University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Romania (Daniel Nelson), Czechoslovakia (Otto Ulc, SUNY Binghamton), China (Donald Gaspar, City University, London), and the USSR (Stephen White). A comprehensive introduction by Daniel Nelson provides background information, and Stephen White has contributed a concluding synthesis.