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Many people deserve my thanks and appreciation. It would not have been possible to carry out this study without the support and cooperation of many, many people in the Honduran Congress, ranging from the many deputies who graciously granted interviews to the staff who helped me navigate the informal rules of operation. While I cannot thank all the interviewees, there are a few people whose support and help must be acknowledged: Santiago David Amador and Johnny Handal Hawit, the leaders of the Liberal Party and the National Party in the Congress, both of whom gave invaluable assistance by urging their colleagues to grant me interviews and to fill out my survey. In addition, I thank Doña Ana and Doña Beatriz and their colleagues in the Secretaria Adjunta for their willingness to get me innumerable files and papers from the Congress Archive, and for granting me their friendship during the many weeks I worked in their office; they made working in the Congress fun. Doña Mercedes de Montes and her entire family, as well as Anna Acosta and her family, also gave me their friendship and support during all my various fieldwork trips to Honduras. Many colleagues in political science also are due my thanks for their comments and constructive feedback during the long process that eventually led to this book. Kathleen Bawn, Ernesto Calvo, Damarys Canache, Scott Desposato , Kathryn Hochstetler, Wendy Hunter, Mark Jones, Marisa Kellam, Monika Nalepa, Nico Petrovsky, David Pion-Berlin, Randy Stevenson, Guy Whitten, Bruce Wilson, and Joan Wolf read chapters and offered very useful advice. Chris Diaz worked hard helping me with the initial coding for the deputy role analysis, as well as coding the target of hundreds of pieces of legislation. Maria Escobar-Lemmon deserves very special thanks for reading most of the book multiple times and for her unfailing support of this project, not just as a colleague but also as a friend. Texas A&M University supported this project in various, essential ways, including sabbatical leave to write the initial draft of the manuscript, and several grants that funded fieldwork trips to Honduras. Funding from the Acknowledgments National Science Foundation (grant #Y460895) also made fieldwork in Honduras possible. Sandy Thatcher at Penn State Press deserves my thanks for his support for this book over the long haul. I truly appreciate it, and I thank him for working with me. Finally, I must thank my family for supporting me and this project. My mom has given never-failing emotional support from the very beginning of my studies of Latin America, and for this project in particular; I thank her too for taking me on my first trip to Honduras when I was a very impressionable child. My husband, Forest, deserves my immense thanks for his encouragement , for reading the entire manuscript multiple times, for helping to collect archival data, and for joining me on fieldwork trips to Honduras. Without him this project would not have been completed—I thank him so very much for all his help, both scholarly and emotional. xiv a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s ...

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