Abstract
That Russia in the post-Soviet era became increasingly super-presidential within a semi-presidential political structure is beyond dispute. It is far less clear how to characterise the state of Russia’s political and economic institutions — including, parliament, political parties, the legal system or elections and even the executive itself. In the wake of the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies, the degree to which the Russian polity is institutionalised beyond the institution of the presidency is not obvious; nor is the nature of those institutions unambiguous. Is Russia de-institutionalised, or is it weakly institutionalised? Were other political institutions transformed via co-optation or political emasculation into mere supports for the presidency? Or, on the contrary, have certain institutions other than the presidency been strengthened — perhaps even endowed with hidden potential for the development of serious counterweights to the presidency for the future? Much of the ambiguity is symbolised in the person of Vladimir Putin himself. On the one hand, Putin once cried ‘anything but institutions!’1 and worked for eight years to centralise power in the presidency, causing some to warn that the ‘centralisation of power [can]not compensate for the absence of political institutions’.2 On the other hand, Putin unequivocally called for the consolidation of a genuinely competitive party system.
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Notes
Vladimir Putin, ‘50 years of European Integration and Russia’ (25 March 2007), http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/03/25/1133_type104017_ 120738.shtml. His exclamation was in context of Russia-EU relations, but generally illustrates his attitude towards institutional pluralism.
Dmitri Trenin, ‘Legacy of Vladimir Putin’, Carnegie Moscow Centre (October 2007), /en/print/76874-print, 3.
Archie Brown, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutions in the Soviet and Russian Transition’, presented to the AAASS (Toronto, 20–23 November 2003), p. 26.
For a bibliography of Archie Brown’s work from 1969 to 2004, annotated by Julie Newton, see Alex Pravda, ed., Leading Russia ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), pp. 275–94.
B. Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The ‘New Institutionalism’ ( London: Continuum Press, 2005 ), p. 4.
Influential rational choice theorists continued to question the exogenous importance of institutions well into the mid-1990s and 2000s. As one theorist wrote in 1995, ‘There is, strictly speaking, no separate animal that we can identify as an institution. There is only rational behaviour conditioned on the expectations about the behaviour and reactions of others’: cited by Kenneth Shepsle, ‘Rational Choice Institutionalism’, in R. Rhodes, S. Binder, B. Rockman, The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 26; see also Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science, pp. 1–2.
Archie Brown, ‘Problems of Group Influence and Interest Articulation in the Soviet Union’, review article of Skilling and Griffiths, eds, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics in Government and Opposition, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 1972): 229–43
Archie Brown, Soviet Politics and Political Science (London: Macmillan, 1974 and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976)
Archie Brown, ‘Policy-making in Communist States’, review article, Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. XI, No. 4 (Winter 1978): 424–36. In this next article, a review of Jerry Hough’s book, Brown praised Hough’s unfashionable emphasis on political institutions, but nevertheless criticised him for going too far. Focusing too much on the explanatory power of institutions and political process was as unhelpful as neglecting its importance
Lamenting the fashion for single explanatory models, Brown called for broader explanatory frameworks to include political culture, as well as institutions: Archie Brown, ‘Governing the USSR’, review article, Problems of Communism, Vol. XXVIII, No. 5–6 (September–December 1979 ): 103–8
Never losing sight of the importance of institutions and broad-minded frameworks, Brown was well positioned early on to stress the exceptional significance of the institution of Soviet leadership: Archie Brown, ‘The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU’, in Archie Brown, T. H. Rigby, Peter Reddaway, eds, Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR: Essays Dedicated to Leonard Shapiro ( London and New York: Macmillan, 1980 ), pp. 135–57.
Alex Pravda, ‘Archie Brown’, in Alex Pravda, ed., Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 18 (emphasis added).
Archie Brown, ‘Russia and Democratization’, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 46, No. 5 (September–October 1999): 3; Pravda, Leading Russia, p. 19 and fn 65.
Phrase attributed to Robert Legvold, ‘Russian Foreign Policy during Periods of Great State Transformation’, in Robert Legvold, ed., Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century and the Shadow of the Past ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 ), pp. 77–143.
Archie Brown, ‘Pluralistic Trends in Czechoslovakia’, Soviet Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 4 (April 1966): 453–72.
Quote from: Archie Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Zdenek Mlynar, Conversations with Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. xiv
Archie Brown, ‘New Man in the Kremlin’, Problems of Communism, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3 (May/June 1985): 1–23.
Archie Brown, ‘Evaluating Russia’s Democratization’, in Archie Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 )
Archie Brown, ‘Vladimir Putin and the Reaffirmation of Central State Power’, Post Soviet Affairs, Vol. 17, Part 1 (2001): 45–55
A. Brown, L. Shevtsova, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition ( Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001 ).
Archie Brown, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, St Antony’s Series, 1984 ), pp. 2–7.
Charles King, ‘Culture, Context, Violence: Eurasia in Comparative Perspective’, in Stephen Whitefield, ed., Political Culture and Post-Communism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 65, 80; Stephen Whitefield, ‘Political Culture and Post-Communism’, in Ibid., p. 12.
Regarding the Gorbachev period, Brown focuses on perceptions of interests–that is, Gorbachev’s assessment of Soviet interests was informed by ideas: Archie Brown, ‘Perestroika and the End of the Cold War’, Cold War History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (February 2007): 7 (emphasis added).
Term used in reference to Poland, but equally applicable here: Alfred Stepan, ‘Fifth Republic and Semipresidentialism’, Arguing Comparative Politics ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 ), p. 284.
Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 283.
Steven White, ‘The Political Parties’, in Stephen White, Zvi Gitelman and Richard Sakwa, eds, Developments in Russian Politics ( Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 ), p. 90.
Cindy Skach, Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 ), p. 78.
Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership: What it is, How it Happens, Why it Matters ( Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004 ), p. 23.
Neo-authoritarian’ is perhaps more accurate. Without explicitly using the term, Aral Gat describes the Putin model as a new (and, in his view, superior) twist on authoritarianism, not unlike the China model. See: Aral Gat, ‘The Return of the Authoritarian Great Powers’, Foreign Affairs (July–August 2007): 59–69.
In the Putin era, Russians continued to have rock-bottom trust in political parties, despite the (partly manipulated) rise of United Russia. ‘The number of people who appreciate the right to choose between political parties was close to zero–only 3 percent.’ Only 5% of the population trust political parties–the lowest ranking institution: V. Shlapentokh, ‘Trust in Public Institutions in Russia: the Lowest in the World’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 39, 2 (2006): 156–8.
Michael McFaul, ‘Putin’s Plan’, Wall Street Journal (4 December 2007), http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/12201461.html
Masha Lipman, ‘Putin Cements his Grip’, The Washington Post (6 October 2007 ), http://carnegieendowment.corg/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19627&prog=zru
Masha Lipman, ‘Putin’s Power Vacuum’, The Washington Post (14 July 2007), www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19435& prog=zru–
Stephen Blank, ‘The Putin Succession and its Implications for Russian Politics’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 24, 3 (2008): 233, 238, 259.
Vladimir Gel’man and Tomila Lankina, ‘Authoritarian versus Democratic Diffusions: Explaining Institutional Choices in Russia’s Local Government’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 24, 1 (2008): 58.
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© 2010 Julie Newton
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Newton, J. (2010). Introduction: Explaining Political and Economic Change in Post-Soviet Russia. In: Newton, J., Tompson, W. (eds) Institutions, Ideas and Leadership in Russian Politics. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230282940_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230282940_1
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