Introduction: Institutions and Political Change in Russia

Abstract

The transformation of Russia over the last decade has involved wide-ranging institutional changes. At the same time that these momentous changes have been occurring in Russia, political scientists have increasingly recognized the importance of studying institutions as variables influencing political and economic outcomes. The rise of ‘new institutionalism’ — set apart from the ‘old institutionalism’ by its concern to describe actual behaviour, rather than just map formal organizational structures — has helped place the question of institutional design at the centre of studies of radical political change. But new institutionalism brings with it a fundamental problem: how to define institutions.