Federalism And Democratization In Post Communist Russia

This book provides a comparative analysis of the electoral systems, party systems and governmental systems in the ethnic republics and regions of Russia and their impact on democratization and federalism, moving the focus of research from the national level to the vitally important processes of institution building and democratization at the local level and to the study of federalism in Russia.

This book challenges the common perception of authoritarian regimes as incompatible with federalism and decentralization. It examines how the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have managed to exploit federalism and decentralization as useful instruments to help them preserve control, avoid political instability, and to shift blame to the regional authorities in times of crises and policy failures. The authors explain how post-Soviet authoritarian regimes balance the advantages and risks and emphasize the contradictory role of external influences and threats to the institutional design of federalism and decentralization. Advancing our understanding of how the institutions of federalism and decentralization are skillfully constrained, but at the same time used by authoritarian incumbents, they show that federalism and decentralization matter in non-democracies, though the nondemocratic character of the political systems greatly modifies their effects. The authors show the implication of the COVID-19 crisis and current Russian war against Ukraine for the center-regional relations in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of post-Soviet politics, decentralization, federalism, and modern authoritarianism.

Combining the approaches of three fields of scholarship - political science, law and Russian area- tudies - the author explores the foundations and future of the Russian Federation. Russia's political elite have struggled to build an extraordinarily complex federal system, one that incorporates eighty-nine different units and scores of different ethnic groups, which sometimes harbor long histories of resentment against Russian imperial and Soviet legacies. This book examines the public debates, official documents and political deals that built Russia's federal house on very unsteady foundations, often out of the ideological, conceptual and physical rubble of the ancien régime. One of the major goals of this book is, where appropriate, to bring together the insights of comparative law and comparative politics in the study of the development of Russia's attempts to create - as its constitution states in the very first article - a 'Democratic, federal, rule-of-law state'

After the fall of communism in Russia, most observers took for granted that the structures of the new democratic state would be effective agents of the popular will. This assumption was overly optimistic. Eleven respected contributors examine governance in post-Soviet Russia in comparative context, investigating the roots, characteristics, and consequences of the crisis as a whole and its manifestations in the specific realms of tax collection, statistics, federalism, social policy, regulation of the banks, currency exchange, energy policy, and parliamentary oversight of the bureaucracy.

With articles by a high quality set of contributors, including Richard Sakwa, Darrell Slider and Vladimir Gel’man, this book explores the increasingly authoritarian character of Putin’s rule, especially in his second term since 2004.

Exploring the dynamics of state-society relations in post-Soviet Russia, noted scholars examine the nature of authority patterns within and between state and society. The authors explain congruence theory and employ it to interpret contemporary Russian politics. With its strong theoretical orientation, this pathbreaking volume raises new issues in the study of post-communist politics and, from the unifying perspective of congruence theory, provides a range of views on these hotly contested issues.

In recent decades, the regions of Russia have taken different paths of regime transition. Despite the consolidation of an autocratic regime at national level and the centralization steered by Vladimir Putin’s government, the variation across sub-national regimes persists. Using an innovative theoretical framework, this book explores both causes and consequences of democratization in the regions of Russia. It is the first study in the field to systematically integrate structural and agency approaches in order to account for economic, social, historical and international causes of democratization and to trace its consequences. By focusing on the challenging and under-studied topic of sub-national regimes, the book provides a unique perspective on regime transition and the new theoretical framework contributes to a better understanding of democratization world-wide. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of democratization, sub-national regimes, East European politics, comparative politics, post-communism, and international relations.

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.