By including in their theoretical model the ideological positions of partisan executive and legislative players, Aleman and Tsebelis significantly advance our understanding of lawmaking in Latin America. Rarely does an edited collection exhibit such consistency between the overall theoretical argument and the case chapters, and rarely are case chapters so rigorous. Barry Ames, Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh ... Read moreThe importance of agenda setting institutions for the functioning of democratic regimes cannot be overemphasized. This book shows how these institutions interact with the government's majority status and the actors' preferences to produce different patterns of policy-making. It shows that there are institutional and ideological conditions under which minority presidential governments can be legislatively successful, even if at times they cannot get exactly what they would have preferred. All chapters have completely moved away from the models that predicted the catastrophic failure of minority presidential democracies and demonstrate the multiple ways executive-legislative relations are shaped by the interaction between institutions and political conditions. In this sense, this book is a great example of how sophisticated research on Latin American presidentialism has become. Jose A. Cheibub, Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Legislative Institutions and Agenda Control is a major theoretical and empirical contribution to the literatures on legislatures, legislative/executive relationships, and policy-making. Scott Mainwaring, Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame Show Less