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Post-Communist Russia is an instance of the phenomenon of
authoritarian modernization project, which is perceived as a set of
policies intended to achieve a high level of economic development,
while political freedoms remain beyond the current modernization
agenda or are postponed to a distant future. Why did Russia (unlike
many countries of post-Communist Europe) pursue authoritarian
modernization after the Soviet collapse? What is the ideational
agenda behind this project and why does it dominate Russia's
post-Communist political landscape? What are the mechanisms of
political governance, which maintain this project and how have they
adopted and absorbed various democratic institutions and practices?
Why has this project brought such diverse results in various policy
arenas, and why have the consequences of certain policies become so
controversial? Why, despite so many controversies, shortcomings and
flaws, has this project remained attractive in the eyes of a large
proportion of the Russian elite and ordinary citizens? This volume
intended to place some of these questions on the research agenda
and propose several answers, encouraging further discussions about
the logic and mechanisms of the authoritarian modernization project
in post-Communist Russia and its effects on Russia's politics,
economy, and society.
By the end of the 2000s Russia had become an increasingly
authoritarian state, which was characterised by the following
features: outrageously unfair and fraudulent elections, the
existence of weak and impotent political parties, a heavily
censored (often self-censored) media, weak rubber-stamping
legislatures at the national and sub-national levels, politically
subordinated courts, the arbitrary use of the economic powers of
the state, and widespread corruption. However, this picture would
be incomplete without taking into account the sub-national
dimension of these subversive institutions and practices across the
regions of the Russian Federation. After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, sub-national political developments in Russia became highly
diversified and the political map of Russia's regions became
multi-faceted. The period of 2000s demonstrated a drive on the part
of the Kremlin to re-centralise politics and governance to the
demise of newly-emerging democratic institutions at both the
national and sub-national levels. Yet, federalism and regionalism
remain key elements of the research agenda in Russian politics, and
the overall political map of Russia's regions is far from being
monotonic. Rather, it is similar to a complex multi-piece puzzle,
which can only be put together through skilful crafting. The 12
chapters in this collection are oriented towards the generation of
more theoretically and empirically solid inferences and provide
critical evaluations of the multiple deficiencies in Russia's
sub-national authoritarianism, including: principal-agent problems
in the relations between the layers of the 'power vertical',
unresolved issues of regime legitimacy that have resulted from
manipulative electoral practices, and the inefficient performance
of regional and local governments. The volume brings together a
team of international experts on Russian regional politics which
includes top scholars from Britain, Canada, Russia and the USA.
The transformation from Communist rule towards democratic development in Russia cannot be fully understood without taking the elites into full consideration. Elites and Democratic Development in Russia examines how elites support and challenge democracy and why they are crucial to Russian democracy in particular. In this innovative volume, twelve respected scholars investigate how elites have affected the transition from Communist rule towards democratic development in Russia. They discuss how the elites' degree of integration on national and regional levels may constitute the main condition for the consolidation of the emerging political regime and interpret the complex post-communist elite patterns of behaviour and attitudes into a theoretical framework of elitist democracy. This book will appeal to those interested in democratization, elites, post-Soviet Russia and post-communist studies. eBook available with sample pages: 0203712757
Post-Communist Russia is an instance of the phenomenon of
authoritarian modernization project, which is perceived as a set of
policies intended to achieve a high level of economic development,
while political freedoms remain beyond the current modernization
agenda or are postponed to a distant future. Why did Russia (unlike
many countries of post-Communist Europe) pursue authoritarian
modernization after the Soviet collapse? What is the ideational
agenda behind this project and why does it dominate Russia's
post-Communist political landscape? What are the mechanisms of
political governance, which maintain this project and how have they
adopted and absorbed various democratic institutions and practices?
Why has this project brought such diverse results in various policy
arenas, and why have the consequences of certain policies become so
controversial? Why, despite so many controversies, shortcomings and
flaws, has this project remained attractive in the eyes of a large
proportion of the Russian elite and ordinary citizens? This volume
intended to place some of these questions on the research agenda
and propose several answers, encouraging further discussions about
the logic and mechanisms of the authoritarian modernization project
in post-Communist Russia and its effects on Russia's politics,
economy, and society.
The politico-economic reforms launched during the late twentieth
century in post-Soviet Russia have led to contradictory and
ambiguous results. The new economic environment and mode of
governance that emerged have been subjected to serious criticism.
What were the causes of these developments? Were they unavoidable
for Russia due to specific factors grounded in the countrys
previous experiences? Or were they an intended result of actions
taken by the leaders of the country during the last few decades?
The authors of this book share neither a deterministic approach,
which implies that Russia is bound to fail because of the nature of
its economic and political evolution, nor a voluntarist approach,
which implies that these failures were caused only by the
incompetence and/or malicious intentions of its leaders. Instead,
this study offers a different framework for the analysis of
political and economic developments in present-day Russia. It is
based on four isideas, interests, institutions, and illusions.
Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985-2000:
Generations, Ideas, and Changes analyzes the impact of generational
changes and ideational changes on major political and economic
reforms conducted in Russia during the late twentieth century. This
book examines how the policy agenda was shaped by the ideas of the
generations' representatives for the sixtiers and seventiers.
Representatives of the generation of sixtiers conducted reforms
from 1985 to 1991 and invested major efforts in political
liberalization but did not pay enough attention to economic
reforms. On the other hand, the reformers from the generation of
seventiers, who were in charge of policy making from 1991 to 1998,
were genuinely oriented toward market building but rather
insensitive to the democratization of the political regime. This
book explores how these differences in ideational agendas produced
inconsistent and controversial outcomes from both stages of
reforms. As a consequence, Russia only partially implemented the
idea of market economic reforms, while the process of political
reforms resulted in the rise of new authoritarianism.
In this book, Vladimir Gel'man considers bad governance as a
distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of
formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different
from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly
intentionally because the political leaders of these countries
establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their
own self-interests. Gel'man considers bad governance as a primarily
agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He
addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in
Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based
on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime
dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days,
bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at
least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a
history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of
law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent
matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of
state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad
governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The
problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are
short and the external constraints on their behavior are not
especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way
because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives.
Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this
phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and
policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel'man
discusses the logic of building and maintaining the
politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of
its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative
perspective.
In this book, Vladimir Gel'man considers bad governance as a
distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of
formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different
from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly
intentionally because the political leaders of these countries
establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their
own self-interests. Gel'man considers bad governance as a primarily
agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He
addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in
Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based
on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime
dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days,
bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at
least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a
history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of
law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent
matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of
state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad
governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The
problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are
short and the external constraints on their behavior are not
especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way
because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives.
Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this
phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and
policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel'man
discusses the logic of building and maintaining the
politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of
its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative
perspective.
Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon
of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting
the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections,
political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of
the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the
electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What
are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely
future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions.
Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically
presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors
that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the
country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national
political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and
enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and
maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around
individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially
successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled
post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin
rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and
the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by
imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing
conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges
for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to
come.
Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985-2000:
Generations, Ideas, and Changes analyzes the impact of generational
changes and ideational changes on major political and economic
reforms conducted in Russia during the late twentieth century. This
book examines how the policy agenda was shaped by the ideas of the
generations' representatives for the "sixtiers" and "seventiers."
Representatives of the generation of "sixtiers" conducted reforms
from 1985 to 1991 and invested major efforts in political
liberalization but did not pay enough attention to economic
reforms. On the other hand, the reformers from the generation of
"seventiers," who were in charge of policy making from 1991 to
1998, were genuinely oriented toward market building but rather
insensitive to the democratization of the political regime. This
book explores how these differences in ideational agendas produced
inconsistent and controversial outcomes from both stages of
reforms. As a consequence, Russia only partially implemented the
idea of market economic reforms, while the process of political
reforms resulted in the rise of new authoritarianism.
The contributors in this interdisciplinary collection address the
problem of interconnection between the study of the "Other," either
Russian or American, and the shaping of national identities in the
two countries at different stages of US-Russian relations. The
focus of research interests were typically determined by the
political and social debates in scholars' native countries. In this
book, leading Russian and American scholars analyze the problems
arising from these intersections of academic, political, and
sociocultural contexts and the implicit biases they entail. The
book is divided into two parts, the first being a historical
overview of past configurations of the interrelationship between
fields and agendas, and the second covering the role of
institutionalized area studies in the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. In both parts the role of the "human
factor" in the study of mutual representations is elucidating.
By the end of the 2000s, the term "resource curse" had become so
widespread that it had turned into a kind of magic keyword, not
only in the scholarly language of the social sciences, but also in
the discourse of politicians, commentators and analysts all over
the world-like the term "modernization" in the early 1960s or
"transition" in the early 1990s. In fact, the aggravation of many
problems in the global economy and politics, against the background
of the rally of oil prices in 2004-2008, became the environment for
academic and public debates about the role of natural resources in
general, and oil and gas in particular, in the development of
various societies. The results of numerous studies do not give a
clear answer to questions about the nature and mechanisms of the
influence of the oil and gas abundance on the economic, political
and social processes in various states and nations. However, the
majority of scholars and observers agree that this influence in the
most of countries is primarily negative. Resource Curse and
Post-Soviet Eurasia: Oil, Gas, and Modernization is an in-depth
analysis of the impact of oil and gas abundance on political,
economic, and social developments of Russia and other post-Soviet
states and nations (such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan). The
chapters of the book systematically examine various effects of
"resource curse" in different arenas such as state building, regime
changes, rule of law, property rights, policy-making, interest
representation, and international relations in theoretical,
historical, and comparative perspectives. The authors analyze the
role of oil and gas dependency in the evolution and subsequent
collapse of the Soviet Union, authoritarian drift of post-Soviet
countries, building of predatory state and pendulum-like swings of
Russia from "state capture" of 1990s to "business capture" of
2000s, uneasy relationships between the state and special interest
groups, and numerous problems of "geo-economics" of pipelines in
post-Soviet Eurasia.
By the end of the 2000s, the term "resource curse" had become so
widespread that it had turned into a kind of magic keyword, not
only in the scholarly language of the social sciences, but also in
the discourse of politicians, commentators and analysts all over
the world- like the term "modernization" in the early 1960s or
"transition" in the early 1990s. In fact, the aggravation of many
problems in the global economy and politics, against the background
of the rally of oil prices in 2004 2008, became the environment for
academic and public debates about the role of natural resources in
general, and oil and gas in particular, in the development of
various societies. The results of numerous studies do not give a
clear answer to questions about the nature and mechanisms of the
influence of the oil and gas abundance on the economic, political
and social processes in various states and nations. However, the
majority of scholars and observers agree that this influence in the
most of countries is primarily negative. Resource Curse and
Post-Soviet Eurasia: Oil, Gas, and Modernization is an in-depth
analysis of the impact of oil and gas abundance on political,
economic, and social developments of Russia and other post-Soviet
states and nations (such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan). The
chapters of the book systematically examine various effects of
"resource curse" in different arenas such as state building, regime
changes, rule of law, property rights, policy-making, interest
representation, and international relations in theoretical,
historical, and comparative perspectives. The authors analyze the
role of oil and gas dependency in the evolution and subsequent
collapse of the Soviet Union, authoritarian drift of post-Soviet
countries, building of predatory state and pendulum-like swings of
Russia from "state capture" of 1990s to "business capture" of
2000s, uneasy relationships between the state and special interest
groups, and numerous problems of "geo-economics" of pipelines in
post-Soviet Eurasia."
Focusing on the vastly different outcomes of post-Soviet regime
transitions, this study explores why some societies have become
more democratic and some have not. Based on in-depth comparative
analyses, the book assesses political developments in six of
Russia's regions (Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod, Volgograd, Ryazan',
Ul'yanovsk, and Tver' oblasts) since 1988. The authors consider the
influence of Soviet governance systems on the emergence of
cleavages and new actors in the post-Soviet period. They also
analyze the impact of institutional changes on regional regimes and
the success or failure of formal institutions as a framework for
political competitiveness. Placing their detailed field data within
the larger comparative and theoretical context of political
transitions, the authors are able to explain the mixed outcomes of
post-communist regime change in Russia and other post-Soviet
nations. With its innovative model of path-contingent
democratization and its new typology of political regimes and
regime transitions, this book will be essential reading for all
scholars of democracy.
According to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, adopted in
1993, local autonomy is one of the fundamental principles of the
constitutional system. The Politics of Local Government in Russia
aims to provide a dedicated and comprehensive discussion of the
pursuit of local self-government in contemporary Russia where
"local" refers to the third tier of government beyond federal and
regional governments. Some of the ablest scholars in the field
focus on the existing institutional and social climate for
municipal and district level government in Russia while placing
recent reforms in a comparative and historical perspective.
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