Abstract
Are presidents dangerous? That is, are they actually a threat to the republics they are sworn to protect? A string of failed presidential regimes in various regions of the world since 1945—failed in the sense that they were or became authoritarian states—led to a “sharp polemic” among scholars “on the subject of whether presidential or parliamentary democracy is the ‘better’ form of representative government,” in which most scholars have by now come out “quite squarely behind parliamentarism as the preferred alternative”’ Indeed, to say that academics and constitutional engineers are pessimistic about the capacity of presidentialism to strengthen democracy in Russia or anywhere else is something of an understatement: recent critics, as one scholar has written, are “unrelievedly negative” in their assessment of the consequences of presidential arrangements and their “inherent vices.”2
And of course the president declares that he was chosen by the people and he is subordinate to, and answerable to, no one but the people. Well, except maybe also to the Lord God ... when He’s not asleep. And thats that, the circle is closed!
—Russian parliament member Vladimir Isakov, 1993
I don’t trust anyone, and I am not planning to vote. The only thing I know about elections is that we will be on alert the day of the polls.
—A Russian police officer, 1995
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Notes
Matthew Shugart and John Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 2.
Kurt von Mettenheim, “Introduction,” in Kurt von Mettenheim, ed., Presidential Institutions and Democratic Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 2–3.
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1993), p. 4.
Edward Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787–1984, 5th ed. (New York: NewYork University Press, 1984), pp. 21–22, 356.
“France’s Imperial Presidency,” The Economist, April 22, 1995, p. 49.
Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (NewYork: The Free Press, 1989), p. xix.
See, for example, Arend Lijphart’s discussion and typologies in Arend Lijphart, ed., Parliamentary versus Presidential Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially pp. 6–9.
Although Russia is technically structured as a “semipresidential” system—a relatively rare arrangement where the president appoints a prime minister to act as parliamentary leader—it conforms to the “pure” presidential model in all important respects. Although there have been attempts to present semipresidentialism as a kind of institutional “third way,” I remain unconvinced that semipresidentialism, as it has been practiced in the very few systems in which it exists, is anything more than a variant on “pure” presidentialism. Giovanni Sartori has wrestled with the problem of defining which systems are truly “semipresidential,” and he rightly points out the messy categorizations that result from definitions based solely on things like a directly elected presidency. While I accept his narrower definition as clearer, I disagree that it describes a system all that different in practice from presidentialism, particularly in Russia. See Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering (New York: New York University Press, 1994), chapter 7. For a thoughtful dissent on this issue, see Eugene Huskey, “Democracy and Institutional Design in Russia,” Demokratizatsiya, Fall 1996. For more discussion of the question of Russian semipresidentialism, see Thomas Nichols, The Logic of Russian Presidentialism, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1301 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1998).
Quoted in J. E . S . H ayward, “ P residentialism and F rench P olitics,” ParliamentaryAffairs, W inter 1964/1965, p. 29.
Juan J. L inz, “ P residential or P arliamentary D emocracy: D oes I t M ake a D ifference?,” in Juan J. L inz and A rturo V alenzuela, eds., TheFailure ofPresidentialDemocracy ( B altimore: Johns H opkins U niversity P ress, 1994), p. 7.
Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, “Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism,” World Politics, October 1993, p. 18.
Scholars of the American presidency are not immune to this kind of nonfalsifiable description of presidential aggrandizement. Consider Arthur Schlesinger’s 1973 discussion of the enlargement of presidential war-making powers: “It was as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation. As it took place, there dwindled away checks, both written and unwritten, that had long held the Presidency under control.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1973), p. ix.
S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 2.
These presumptions reflect the influence of the “new institutionalism,” which treats institutions as “political actors in their own right” that can then “assume a life of their own, extracting societal resources, socializing individuals, and even altering the basic nature of civil society itself.” See James March and Johan Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” The American Political Science Review, September 1984, p. 738, and Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State:Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics, January 1984, p. 240. I use the term “institutions” in its common understanding as the formal and informal patterns of behavior and structures that are, in the words of Douglass North, the “rules of the game in a society or, more formally ... the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction:’ See Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (NewYork: Norton, 1981), p. 201, and Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3.
The attribution of power as a generic goal is a variation on so-called “thick” rational choice approaches. For a discussion of problems associated with positing such broadly similar goals across cases, see Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 17–20.
Valerie Bunce, “Comparing East and South,” Journal of Democracy, July 1995, p. 99.
See R. Kent Weaver and Bert Rockman, “When and How Do Institutions Matter?” in R. Kent Weaver and Bert Rockman, eds., Do Institutions Matter? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993), p. 451.
Stephen Holmes, “The Postconununist Presidency,” East European Constitutional Review, Fall 1993/Winter 1994 double issue, p. 37.
See Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” p. 123.
Holmes, “The Postcommunist Presidency,” p. 39.
Al’bert Plutnik, “V Dume b’iut zhenshchinu,” Izvestiia, September 12, 1995, p. 1.
Terry Moe, “Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, vol. 6 (special issue) 1990, p. 240.
Weaver and Rockman have noted an obvious flaw in the parliamentary alternative, namely, that the out-party has a particular incentive to undermine the party in power by not cooperating and depicting the performance of the ruling party as poorly as possible. Weaver and Rockman, eds., p. 24; also see R. Kent Weaver, “Are Parliamentary Systems Better?,” The Brookings Review, Summer 1985.
Peter Ordeshook notes, correctly, that from a technical standpoint the Russian constitution reflects “an extremely shallow understanding of the separation of powers.” Elena Mizulina, one of the Duma’s leading judicial experts, believes that the system is flawed not only in terms of legislative-executive relations, but even in the balance of power between the upper and lower houses of the legislature itself. See Peter Ordeshook, “Institutions and Incentives,” Journal of Democracy, April 1995, p. 50, and interview with Elena Mizulina, Moscow, Russia, July 12, 1994.
Barbara Mizstal, Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996), p. 229.A recent study of Russian social opinions put it more succinctly: “Distrust is a pervasive legacy of communist rule” Richard Rose, “Postcommunism and the Problem of Trust,” Journal of Democracy, July 1994, p. 19.
For a more detailed discussion of sovietism and social capital, see Thomas Nichols, “Russian Democracy and Social Capital,” Social Science Information, December 1996.
Kenneth Jowitt calls these the phases of “transformation” and “consolidation.” See Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1992), pp. 56–57.
See Sarah Terry, “Thinking about Post-Communist Transitions: How Different Are They?,” Slavic Review, Spring 1993, pp. 335–336.
John L owenhardt, TheReincarnation ofRussia ( D urham, NC : D uke U niversity P ress, 1995), p. 6.
V. Zamkovoi, Stalinizm: stalinskaia model’ totalitarizma (Moscow: Institut Mezhdunarodnogo Prava i Ekonomiki, 1995), pp. 18–19. Zamkovoi calls this “open or latent sadomasochism,” but in a sociopolitical rather than sexual context.
Gennadii Khokhriakov, Russkie: kto my? (Moscow:VIEMS, 1993), p. 82.
As Niklas Luhmann puts it, “Familiarity is an unavoidable fact of life; trust is a solution for specific problems of risk.” See Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: The Free Press, 1995), Chapter 1, and Niklas Luhmann, “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives,” in Diego Gambetta, ed., Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988), p. 95.
Rigby notes that this set the pattern of Soviet life into the 1970s.T. H. Rigby, “Stalinism and the Mono-Organizational Society” in Robert Tucker, ed., Stalinism (NewYork: Norton, 1977), p. 62. My colleague Sergei Baburkin of Yaroslavl’ University dissents from this view, suggesting that many of these activities (particularly sports clubs and the like), although state-sponsored, provided “escape” from political life, which he argues represented a kind of voluntary association among nonpolitical citizens.
Jacek K uron, “ O vercoming T otalitarianism,” Journal ofDemocracy, O ctober 1994, p. 72.
Jonathan G rant has detailed the “elaborate process” through which the S oviet regime “socially reconstructed the hobby of stamp collecting,” a process undertaken mostly by midlevel bureaucrats who could not tolerate the idea of a hobby as “an autonomous realm of social activity.” S ee J. Grant, “The S ocial C onstruction of P hilately in the E arly S oviet E ra,” ComparativeStudies inSociety andHistory, S pring 1995, p. 495. B y chance, I experienced the effect of the meddling in this particular hobby in a small way in 1987. M y father, a lifetime philatelist, accompanied me to the S oviet U nion, where he visited a state-run S oviet stamp shop (a small and cheerless place filled only with stamps from socialist nations), and found—after giving one of the collectors there a book of U . S . stamps as a gift—that the shop itself was not really part of the hobbyists’ community but merely a meeting point. A merican stamps in hand, the collectors quickly gathered outside the store in a hushed knot to divvy them up. B y owning A merican stamps, which were apparently considered the equivalent of hard currency, they were now pursuing their hobby in violation of S oviet law
See Timothy Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (NewYork: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986), p. 54; see also Donna Bahry and Brian Silver, “Intimidation and the Symbolic Uses ofTerror in the USSR,” Amencan Political Science Review, Winter 1987.
Richard Lotspeich, “Crime in the Transition Economies,” Europe-Asia Studies, Winter 1995, p. 571.
See John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 73; for a more detailed listing of the actual organizations and a brief picture of how they changed and mutated in so short a time, see Neformal’naia Rossiia (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990), and Novye politicheskie i obshchestvennye organizatsii (1987–1991), part 2 (Moscow: Ministerstvo Kul’tury i Turizma Rossiskoi Federatsii, 1992) and part 3, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia lstoricheskaia Biblioteka Rossii, 1993).
Richard Rose, “Russia as an Hour-Glass Society: A Constitution without Citizens,” East European Constitutional Review, Summer 1995. p. 35.
Ivan Rybkin, Duma: piataia popytka (Moscow: Znanie, 1994), p. 47.
E. N. Danilova and V. A. Iadov, “Kontury sotsial’no-gruppovykh identifikatsii lichnosti v sovremennom rossiiskom obshchestve,” in V. A. Iadov, ed., Sotsial’naia identifikatsii lichnosti (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, Institut Sotsiologii, 1993), p. 130.
Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL:The Free Press, 1958), p. 86.
Judith S hklar, OrdinaryVices ( C ambridge, MA : H arvard/B elknap, 1984).
Gabriel Almond and SidneyVerba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 490.
One of the vexing issues of Russian survey research has always been the high proportion of “don’t know” or “hard to say” answers, but in a recent study Ellen Carnaghan has done an admirable job in showing that these answers are not only decipherable but do not in themselves represent a danger to democratic stability in Russia. See Ellen Carnaghan, “Alienation, Apathy, or Ambivalence? ‘Don’t Knows’ and Democracy in Russia,” Slavic Review, Summer 1996, pp. 325–363.
The H. J. Kaiser Foundation, Why Don’t Americans Trust the Government? (Menlo Park, CA: The Kaiser Family Foundation, 1995). The study is summarized and interpreted in a series in The Washington Post, January 28 — February 1, 1996, and February 4, 1996. For the study of West Germany, see Kendall Baker, Russell Dalton, and Kai Hildebrandt, Germany Transformed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Attila Agh, “The Experiences of the First Democratic Parliaments in East Central Europe,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 28, no. 2, 1995, p. 205.
Thomas Baylis, “Presidents versus Prime Ministers: Shaping Executive Authority in Eastern Europe,” World Politics, April 1996, p. 308.
Sergei Shargorodsky, “Russia-Revolution Day,” AP North American Wire, November 7, 1995. Tiulkin added that working people “cannot come to power by parliamentary means.”
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© 1999 Thomas M. Nichols
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Nichols, T.M. (1999). Presidentialism and the Politics of Mistrust in Modern Russia. In: The Russian Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299088_1
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