ABSTRACT
Political life has been characterizened by a struggle for power, swinging from cooperation to large-scale war. Rivals used all means they had to cultivate their power and even sought power beyond the national boundaries. The balance of power between rivals provided the parliament with reasonable room to manoeuvre and the two ruling parties tried to reach a compromise over many issues. The parliament, therefore, emerged as a powerful institution, to the extent that it was prepared to withdraw confidence from the government in 1991 for raising diesel prices, whereupon the government retreated. The party system and electoral struggle hardly helped the candidates representing new modernising trends or marginalised segments in Yemeni society. The Yemeni Parliament to a large extent reflects its external environment. The external variables largely determine its capacities. The strong networks of kinship and patron-client relationships and the impurely democratic institutional framework of the Yemeni party system, have characterized the fluid transitional political, social and economic structure.
