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More Than a Sum of Parts

Anatomy of the Federal Assembly on the Road from Emancipation to Demise

Summary/Abstract: In the reviewer’s opinion, Adéla Gjuričová and Tomáš Zahradníček, using innovative analytical methods of the so-called new institutionalism, perceptively capture changes of the Federal Parliament in Czechoslovakia since the fall of the Communist regime until the division of the state into the Czech and the Slovak Republics in their monograph titled "Návrat parlamentu: Češi a Slováci ve Federálním shromáždění 1989–1992" [Return of the Parliament: Czechs and Slovaks in the Federal Assembly 1989–1992] (Prague: Argo and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2018). The result is an innovative and absorbing historical monograph possessing a vivid literary style, which permits a better understanding of the revolutionary period. The reviewer finds important watersheds and factors in the development of the Federal Assembly during the period in question, conjuring up parallels of some processes taking place at that time, such as personal purges in the ranks of deputies, initial emancipation of the legislative body, or subsequent centralization of political decision-making in the hands of winning political parties, in older historical revolutions. In the reviewer’s opinion, the two authors offer, unlike most political science studies, a vivid description of an apparently inevitable, but also open political process accompanied by fateful decisions and dramatic turns. He argues that the book is the most inspiring publication about the Czechoslovak democratic revolution in recent years.

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