Coalition realignment in the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania and the fall of the Vagnorius government

Abstract

The third government of the reconstituted Republic of Lithuania fell in July 1992. The Supreme Council, the legislative body of the republic, accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Gediminas Vagnorius, thus ending a prolonged period of confrontation between the government and the parliament. Shortly thereafter, Aleksandras Abisala became the new Prime Minister. It is generally agreed that the Vagnorius government was the victim of a coalition realignment within the Supreme Council. This paper analyzes the extent of the shift in the parliament and considers the reasons that it occurred. It concludes with a short discussion of the probable impact of the legislative shift. Statistical methods used to analyze legislative behavior in the West are employed in the analysis. Given the nature of Communist political systems, such methods were neither relevant nor practical in the past. The emergence of salient legislatures with policy-making roles as well as the increased availability of data opens the new democracies of the Baltic region to the tools of main stream political science. The analysis relies on the results of the thirty-two roll call votes conducted within the Supreme Council from its installation in March 1990 to May 1992, just prior to Vagnorius's resignation. These votes are listed at Appendix A. There are 141 deputies in the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania. However, fifteen of them served in ministerial positions in the government for prolonged periods of time. Consequently, they did not participate in a majority of the parliamentary roll-call votes. These deputies were extracted from the data set.