Abstract
In this comment, I highlight similarities between Russia’s contemporary political system and other post-Cold War dictatorships. Most modern dictatorships hold semi-competitive elections. That is, regime officials face competition in elections, but playing fields are tilted so as to leave little suspense about who will win. I suggest that semi-competitive elections and the encouragement of litigation by citizens against local and regional officials, as described by Thornhill and Smirnova (Accepted/In press), have similar functions from the dictator’s point of view. They help the ruling elite with monitoring and controlling local officials whose behavior might otherwise alienate citizens enough to threaten the dictatorial elite with overthrow. Thus the real benefits citizens receive from the increased use of the courts to resolve disputes and electoral competition among politicians are counterbalanced by the contribution these institutions make to the prolongation of dictatorship.
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Notes
Calculated from data in the Authoritarian Regimes Dataset, http://sites.psu.edu/dictators/. This kind of simple, dichotomous definition of regime type is also used in the Cheibub et al. (2010) data set. For some purposes, a scholar might want to use a more incremental measurement of dictatorship, but a dichotomous measure is useful for setting a baseline against which to compare Russia.
A part of the answer is that developed democracies now provide more aid to countries that hold elections. Before the end of the Cold War, dictatorships that held uncontested election rituals received more aid per capita than those that held no elections or those with semi-competitive ones. Post-Cold War, however, those that hold semi-competitive elections receive more aid than other dictatorships (Geddes et al. 2018).
Note the number of analyses of China’s ruling party’s use of citizen petitions and internet freedom to complain about officials as a means of monitoring local officials (e.g., Paik 2009; Lorentzen 2014). China is one of the few contemporary party-led dictatorships that hold no direct elections above the village level.
Some dictatorships only encourage high turnout among ethnic or class groups likely to vote for them.
McCubbins and Schwartz (1984) coined the term “fire alarm” for the use of complaints or appeals to alert principals to the misbehavior of their bureaucratic agents in situations in which continuous monitoring would be costly.
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Geddes, B. Why dictators hold semi-competitive elections and encourage the use of semi-independent courts: a comment on Thornhill and Smirnova’s “litigation and political transformation”. Theor Soc 47, 595–601 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9328-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9328-4