Abstract
Most Eurasian countries’ political systems are not accurately described as some version of either democracy or authoritarianism. Nor does it advance social science to study each of these countries’ political systems as being completely unique, sharing no significant commonalities with those of other countries. Instead, it is more fruitful to understand many Eurasian countries as a type of hybrid regime, a system that combines important elements of both democracy and autocracy in some way. One of the most important features of Eurasia's hybrid regimes, one that is shared by many hybrid regimes worldwide, is that they combine contested elections with pervasive political clientelism. Political developments in these countries can thus be usefully understood as machine politics, and the development of political systems can be understood as processes of rearranging the components of the machines in different ways. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated through an in-depth study of the Russian Federation. It is argued that Russian political development under Putin is best understood not as “authoritarianization” but as a process in which Russia transitioned from a system of “competing pyramids” of machine power to a “single-pyramid” system, a system dominated by one large political machine. It turns out that in single-pyramid systems that preserve contested elections, as does Russia, public opinion matters more than in typical authoritarian regimes.
How can we best understand political developments in post-Soviet Eurasia? Three traditional lenses are frequently invoked. One is the narrow country studies approach. This approach focuses only on one individual country's dynamics without relating them to any other country, without attempting to draw any conclusions that could be useful for a comparative understanding of other countries, and without drawing on the collective wisdom of comparative research to gain insight into what is happening in this country. 1 While studying a country like Russia or Kazakhstan alone is certainly worthwhile, this is an underachieving approach from the perspective of social science because it does not contribute as much as it could to the central social scientific goal of building cumulative knowledge through theory.
For a discussion and strong critique of such works, see Gel'man (2000, 2008).
The second traditional lens is the democracy perspective: When the USSR first broke apart, most Eurasian states except Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were assumed to be “young” democracies and the driving forces of political system change were assumed to be such factors as public opinion, political party strategy, electoral institutions, and incumbent authorities’ ability to manipulate these elements as is typically done in democracies. 2 These topics still structure many of the best textbooks on Eurasian countries. 3 But this approach – which in essence frames our understanding of Russia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and other Eurasian countries in the same terms we use for Western European polities – was never an ideal fit with these countries and in most cases (led by Russia) the fit seems to be growing worse. 4
Bunce (1995); Colton (1992); Fish (1995); Huntington (1991); Karl & Schmitter (1991); McFaul (2001); O'Donnell (1993). More recently, see Shleifer and Treisman (2004).
E.g., Hesli (2007); Remington (2010); Sakwa (2008); White, Sakwa and Hale (2010).
Most of these textbooks have introduced some changes in later editions to adapt to more recent developments, but the underlying framework they adopt has remained essentially the same.
A third approach, increasingly popular among Western specialists on Eurasia as well as a subset of Eurasian analysts themselves, goes to the opposite extreme and treats Russia and its Eurasian neighbors as autocracies in the mold of Franco's Spain or Amin's Uganda. 5 Factors like public opinion and elections are ruled out as driving forces behind political developments, with most explanations of these developments focusing on the personal interests of the “dictator” and the mechanisms of monitoring and punishment that the dictator uses to prevent meaningful political challenges. Some scholars do allow a role for public opinion, but in the form of what they sometimes call Russia's authoritarian political culture. 6 While this approach does provide a simple explanation for the contraction of contested political space in Russia and most other countries of Eurasia during 2000–2008, it is quite at odds with other ways in which most of today's Eurasian countries differ quite dramatically from 1960s Spain and 1970s Uganda, not to mention the Brezhnevite USSR or even today's Uzbekistan. While some would treat Eurasian countries as being in “transition” to democracy or autocracy, this is also unsatisfactory: Indeed, most political systems of the post-Soviet space have remained something other than pure democracy or pure dictatorship for the entire period since their independence (Carothers, 2002).
E.g., Fish (2001); Roeder (1994).
E.g., Pipes (2004).
In the pages that follow, I propose that the comparative social science analysis of countries with political systems like Russia's – whose system has been widely emulated and even propagated in Eurasia – will be most fruitful by treating its political system not as sui generis but also as neither democracy nor autocracy. Instead, it is helpful to think of Russia and many other Eurasian countries as one type of hybrid regime. A hybrid regime is a political system that combines some democratic and some autocratic elements in significant measure. It is not, however, a mere half-way category: hybrid regimes have their own distinct dynamics that do not simply amount to half of what we would see in a democracy plus half of what we would see in an autocracy. And such systems are far from being unique to Russia or even Eurasia. According to Freedom House measures, about one-third of all of the world's political systems have been what we might call hybrid regimes ever since the mid-1970s, when Freedom House began its well-known global evaluations. 7 The study of Russia, therefore, can help us better understand these dynamics that are relevant to other countries in Eurasia and the world. And more general theories of hybrid regimes, it is argued, can help us better understand Russian developments under Putin (and before him).
Freedom House, http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw09/FIW09_Tables&GraphsForWeb.pdf, access date April 20, 2009.
There are many ways in which a regime can be “hybrid.” One way is exemplified by South Africa under apartheid, which featured free, fair, and highly competitive elections but only among the minority white population. The majority blacks were excluded entirely. To explain outcomes within white community politics, then, one needed the analytical tools of democracy. But to understand the bigger picture, including how whites maintained their dominance, one needed to understand the logic of authoritarianism. Robert Dahl dubbed this form of hybrid regime competitive hegemony (Dahl, 1971).
Russia is an example of a different kind of hybrid regime, one that is far more common than competitive hegemony and that – for convenience sake – we might refer to as an electoral patronal system. First, the formal mechanism for gaining, maintaining, and retaining the most powerful posts in the country is regular elections. Second, real opposition parties are allowed to exist and at least some of them are permitted to compete in these elections. Third, power in the regime is exercised primarily through complex networks of patron–client relations (Afanasiev, 1997). That is, political transactions consist less of abstract promises to support broad programmatic ideas than of concrete promises of personal incentives and private benefits made to specific individuals (jobs, contingent opportunities to gain private income, bribes, help with local problems, assistance to relatives, etc.) as well as explicit or implicit threats made to these same individuals (Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007). In politics, these are the methods of what is known in the West as “machine politics” and in Russia as the “administrative resource” (administrativnyi resurs). Political machines are typically dominated by a patron (such as Yury Luzhkov in Moscow or Huey Long in the American state of Louisiana in the 1930s) who sits atop a “pyramid” of individuals and organizations and distributes resources and punishments to (based on systematic monitoring of) those at lower levels of the pyramid. A whole set of “subpatrons” control different parts of the machine under the supervision of the patron (Medina & Stokes, 2007). In Russian parlance, this is also widely known as the “power vertical” (vertikal’ vlasti).
Political machines can provide real benefits to their constituents and even to the larger communities that they dominate. For example, Huey Long's political machine in Louisiana mobilized a great deal of resources to build universities and infrastructure in a previously underdeveloped American state. But they also can be very coercive, using corruption and pressure (along with inducements like bribes) to remain in power and to get things done. To borrow an image from sports, they strongly “tilt the playing field” to their advantage when it comes to elections and the exercise of power, though they do not eliminate the contest or destroy the field altogether as a true dictatorship does (Levitsky & Way, 2002).
Political machines can exist at many different levels in the same country. A city-level political machine can completely dominate the politics of its own city but be in strong competition with a political machine of a rival city. Political machines at the regional level can similarly be in control of city-level machines in some cities but not in other cities. And likewise, a political machine at the national level might base its authority primarily on some regional- or city-level political machines but not on others. Moreover, regional-level political machines that are not subordinated to the national machine can gang up to try to oppose the national-level machine or rival alliances of regional-level machines. Of course, territorially based political machines are not the only form of patronal pyramids: large corporations in collusion with the state are also a form of patronage pyramid that can be very important in an electoral patronal system. This is especially true where corporations control “company towns,” where large shares of people are dependent on a single corporation for their livelihoods and where the corporation can thus easily influence political outcomes. In short, electoral patronal politics can come in a wide variety of different configurations.
What we have seen in Russia under Putin, it will be argued below, can be understood as a transformation from a “competing-pyramid” system where multiple regional and corporate patronage pyramids actively competed for support to a “single-pyramid” system where the president has effectively combined the most important lower-level patronal networks into one large nationwide political machine. This is very different from saying that Russia has become an authoritarian state since a political machine, even a very large nationwide political machine, behaves in ways that are quite distinct from authoritarianism so long as it does not end elections in which at least some real opposition is allowed to compete.
For one thing, electoral patronal systems force their leaders to pay more attention to public opinion than pure autocracies are usually expected to do. This is because the mere fact of elections that include even just one real opposition party or candidate make the machine vulnerable to collapse if public opinion turns against it. Public support is a resource that opposition politicians (those who would create or expand alternative pyramids) can use to bring people into the streets, to convince subpatrons that the incumbent regime is doomed, to persuade troops that they should not fire on “the people,” or to generate such overwhelming votes against the regime that falsification becomes impossible or so obvious and outrageous that people will be willing to actively oppose it despite threats of repression. As Tucker has also emphasized, elections in such situations can solve important problems of both mass and elite collective action that regime incumbents can usually manipulate to prevent mass mobilization and coordinated elite moves against the authorities (Tucker, 2007). It is for such reasons that the “color revolutions” all took place in electoral patronal systems, in the wake of elections, and among precisely the set of countries with the least popular incumbent presidents (Hale, 2005; McFaul, 2005). And it is also for such reasons that Putin's team has paid such intense attention to monitoring and promoting its own public opinion ratings, a phenomenon that has led Aleksandr Shmelev to call Putin's Russia a “ratingocracy” (reitingokratiia). 8 It is important to realize that this role for public opinion (which primarily acts to strengthen or weaken a political machine's ability to manipulate electoral outcomes and to ensure elite unity between elections) is very different from that typical of democracies (where shifts in public opinion regularly produce incumbent defeat at the ballot box without any attendant strengthening or weakening of the ability to manipulate, coerce, or defraud). One reason why electoral patronal regimes like Russia's should be considered as a category distinct from democracy or dictatorship, therefore, is that public opinion plays a distinct role in these systems.
Aleksandr Shmelev, in a roundtable discussion (Shmelev, 2007).
There are at least two other important reasons for treating them as a separate category, however. For one thing, many of these systems are highly durable, which discredits the notion that they should be treated merely as transitory, as half-way houses on the road to democracy or autocracy. Even a quick look at the political systems of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) makes this clear. The vast majority of countries there have remained far from purely democratic yet have still retained at least some meaningful electoral contestation for a whole decade or more in the post-Soviet period. Since even one decade is quite a significant period of time, it would-be unwise to forego a full understanding of how regimes behave for such a period even if they are all to later shift clearly either to democracy or autocracy.
Moreover, there is strong empirical evidence that hybrid regimes do not behave like democracies or autocracies in terms of many different political outcomes. They do not even behave like half-democracies or half-autocracies, producing outcomes that are roughly in between those that democracies would produce and those that autocracies would produce. In fact, systematic comparative research has found that hybrid regimes are more likely to go to war than either democracies or autocracies (Mansfield & Snyder, 2005), are more prone to state failure than either democracies or autocracies (Goldstone et al., 2000), and have lower rates of business confidence than in either democracies or autocracies (Kenyon & Naoi, 2010). That is, somehow being between democracy and autocracy is associated with higher levels of certain economic, political, and international problems rather than middle levels of these problems. Much more research needs to be done to determine if these relationships are more than coincidental and if regime hybridity is indeed a cause rather than an effect. But at a minimum, these findings provide important cause to study hybrid regimes as potentially something distinct.
While one might treat the 2000s in Russia as nothing other than a period of autocratization, for the purposes of comparative political analysis it might be more useful to describe it as a period in which Russia was transformed from a competing-pyramid to a single-pyramid hybrid regime. Importantly, this implies that the 1990s should not be considered a period of pure democracy in Russia. Indeed, President Boris Yeltsin helped create the electoral patronal system and even showed strong signs of wanting to turn it into a single-pyramid version. Putin's chief contribution was to succeed where Yeltsin failed and then to take this success further than Yeltsin most likely intended. Putin's success in this endeavor is partly due to his tougher leadership, partly due to his greater popularity, and partly due to a change in incumbent thinking that occurred through historical contingency.
While some have interpreted the rise in authoritarian tendencies under Putin as the “return of the past,” the reappearance of the Soviet system, in fact it reflects something new. There is relatively little direct continuity between the old Soviet totalitarian system and the current politics of the Putinite political machine. The perestroika-era reforms and the aftermath of the August 1991 coup attempt largely destroyed the sinews of the Soviet totalitarian system, including Communist Party rule and the command economy. The regional party “prefects” (obkom first secretaries) lost their ability to control their regions as the economic breakdown and reforms stripped them of their power to make funding and supply decisions that could make or break local enterprises and as local legislatures were given power and filled by candidates who were no longer dependent on the CPSU for their careers (Hale, 2003).
Under Yeltsin, three major reforms took place that created the foundation for the electoral patronal system that characterizes Russia today. First, the privatization process and economic restructuring created a series of very large corporate conglomerates that controlled vast resources and organization and that also frequently intervened in politics. The heads of these entities, branded “oligarchs” by their critics, sometimes controlled important mass media outlets (including two of the nation's three major television channels, First Channel and NTV) and depended heavily for their wealth on the beneficence of different parts of the state.
Second, under Yeltsin, newly elected regional leaders were given a great deal of authority to restructure both political institutions and the economic environment in their provinces. The most innovative and proactive among them used this authority not only to alter electoral institutions in ways that reinforced their own advantage, but also to dramatically shape the privatization process locally. Through a variety of formal and informal means, many were able to ensure that either their own personal networks or regional governments themselves owned or controlled enough of the provincial economy (especially the most lucrative and political potent assets) to effectively prevent them from being used by political opponents. Where outright ownership was not possible, regional leaders also developed a wide range of levers by which they could pressure businesses whose owners or managers (or even employees) might be found supporting opposition forces. These levers included everything from licensing authority to the ability to fine or suspend a company's operations through tax or fire inspections. 9
Afanasiev 1997.
Third, Yeltsin himself forcibly converted Russia from a parliamentary-presidential regime in which the Congress of People's Deputies ultimately had the greater legal authority to a strongly presidential regime that was widely dubbed “superpresidential.” The key moment came in 1993, when the President ordered tanks to fire on the parliament building, widely known as the White House, and then called a snap referendum on a new constitution with minimal parliamentary powers. The Duma was not completely powerless, at least when controlled by an opposition party as it was for part of Yeltsin's presidency, but Yeltsin and his associates quickly built a tremendous degree of informal power around various presidential structures, especially the Presidential Administration. The key moment came in 1996, when Yeltsin for the first time vigorously applied various sticks and carrots to mobilize regional political machines and major financial-industrial groups into nationwide pyramid of patronage networks as a way of defeating his Communist Party challenger, Gennady Zyuganov. Zyuganov, initially far ahead in public opinion polls, controlled his own power pyramid, wielding support from a large number of “red governors” who proved unwilling to place their bets on Yeltsin. Initially, Zyuganov even got donations from many large corporations that hoped to hedge their bets and gain favorable treatment should the Communist candidate win (Kolmakov, 2003). Yeltsin's pyramid proved more powerful, however, as the President used his formal and informal presidential authority to provide important transfers of resources to key regions, threaten the same regions with the denial of such funds should they not comply, and provide corporate leaders with highly favorable privatization opportunities in return for campaign financing and biased television coverage on the channels they controlled (Johnson, 2001; Treisman, 1997). The Communists, in control only of a weak legislature at the national level, could not effectively counter these strong presidential moves.
The mechanism that Yeltsin created and first mobilized to win reelection in 1996 was, at root, essentially the same mechanism that Putin developed in the 2000s to create the political system we have today. Putin's main political achievement in this regard was precisely to develop this mechanism, greatly strengthening it and shoring it up through a variety of changes in law and in informal practice. The most important change he made was in radically reducing the autonomy allowed to the subpatrons in the system and thereby tying them more tightly into the pyramid of power he established. So successful had he become by the end of his second term, that Russia had effectively turned into a single-pyramid patronal regime, one almost entirely dominated by Putin and his allies. To be sure, this did not mean that the Kremlin effectively controlled Russia's entire political space, but it did mean that no other set of patrons could pretend to anything close to rivaling the Kremlin's nationwide political machine.
The first set of subpatrons to be reined in consisted of regional leaders. Putin began almost immediately after his May 2000 inauguration, creating a set of seven federal okrugs led by his appointed envoys. The envoys were tasked with reducing the ability of governors to flout federal law and to bend local branches of federal agencies to their own will. By 2008, the center had largely eliminated regional laws that contradicted federal law (which by one estimate was close to one-third of all regional laws at the start of his presidency) and reestablished a significant degree of federal control over local prosecutors, ministries, and courts in most regions (Petrov, 2005; Reuters, 2000). Soon afterwards, he stripped governors of their seats in the Federation Council, replacing them with figures chosen through a system of appointments in which the center wielded significant informal influence. This not only reduced the degree of governors’ direct influence on federal politics as of 2001, but also denied them an important forum for meeting directly with each other in large numbers and coordinating their activities outside of central initiatives. As of July 2003, another reform reduced the degree to which governors could get their own people elected to regional legislatures: At least one chamber of every region's legislature had to fill at least half of its seats through a competition of nationally registered parties’ lists. Now governors had to reach agreement with a federal party to run their candidates under its label or lose control of those seats in the legislature. The most dramatic move, however, came in the wake of the 2004 Beslan tragedy, after which Putin eliminated direct gubernatorial elections and replaced them with a kind of appointment system. In the new system, the president's envoy nominates the candidate, who then must be confirmed by a majority vote in the regional legislature. Partly because the center had made great headway in creating large United Russia fractions in the legislatures after the 2003 reform, no regional legislature has ever rejected a nominee as of the time of this writing. In 2009, the power to nominate was granted to the party having won the most votes in the most recent regional legislative elections.
The result of all these reforms has been a radical reduction in the degree to which governors, one of the Yeltsin-era's chief kinds of subpatron, could act autonomously to influence federal politics. One VTsIOM poll is telling of their reduced prominence: As of July 2008, only two governors were named by more than 4% of the Russian population as being best at solving key problems: Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleev. 10 By one count, all but one “red governor” by 2008 had been either replaced by more Kremlin-friendly individuals (for example, in Bryansk where the KPRF's Yury Lodkin was replaced by United Russia candidate Nikolai Denin) or essentially converted into Kremlin loyalists (for example, Vladimir's Nikolai Vinogradov, who was ultimately expelled by the KPRF). The lone KPRF holdout as of early 2008 was Volgograd's Yury Maksiuta (Kommersant-Vlast, 2008). As a result, virtually all governors were now firmly embedded in the Kremlin's own power pyramid and had much less will and ability than before to join any attempt to form a rival pyramid.
Kommersant, July 24, 2008.
The other set of major subpatrons to be brought into line much more strictly than before was big business, especially the so-called “oligarchs” who could influence mass media coverage of politics. The major moves took place in Putin's first term. Initially, former Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, someone quite instrumental in Putin's own rise to the presidency, was effectively forced to give up key assets (including control over the First Channel) and to leave the country for fear of prosecution. The next business titan to fall was Vladimir Gusinsky, who had largely opposed Putin's rise in 1999–2000 and who controlled the country's third-largest television channel, NTV. A variety of charges led Gusinsky to flee Russia, and the partially state-owned Gazprom took control of NTV by calling in a debt granted in the Yeltsin era that NTV was unable to pay off. Business structures reputedly close to the Kremlin continued to acquire media assets under Putin's presidency far more often than they gave them up, by 2008 even owning relatively minor formerly independent outlets like REN-TV. 11 While the press remained relatively free despite acquisitions by reputedly Kremlin-connected businesses, surveys have showed that as many as 89 percent of all Russian citizens regard television as their primary source of political information. 12
Coalson, Robert. 2008. “NTV's Past Points Toward REN-TV's Future,” End Note, RFE/RL Newsline, March 4.
This particular figure comes from the 2008 Russian Election Study survey of 1130 individuals across the Russian Federation conducted during March–May 2008 by the Demoscope group at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and organized by Timothy J. Colton, Henry E. Hale, and Michael McFaul. Figure supplied by the survey authors.
Media were not the oligarchs’ only source of influence, of course, and Kremlin forces accordingly took other steps to ensure that business worked in concert toward the national objectives set by the President. The most dramatic move was the demonstrative October 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time Russia's richest man and owner of the Yukos corporate empire. While the Kremlin's charges of his corruption (as with the charges against Berezovsky and Gusinsky) were credible, observers were widely doubtful that Khodorkovsky and his circle were the only guilty parties; those who acted in a more loyal fashion were pointedly not facing such problems. In fact, the Khodorkovsky arrest was preceded by a number of other Kremlin moves designed both to cow and coordinate businesses that could potentially become important players in politics. In 2000, for example, Putin met with business leaders and was widely believed to have promised to leave them in control of their assets so long as they did not operate against Kremlin wishes in politics. One theory is that it was this “pact” that Khodorkovsky broke, precipitating his arrest. 13 The Kremlin worked not only to avoid opposition, but also to coordinate business political activity so that it was not divided among different Kremlin loyalists competing for influence under Putin's wing. Thus in the run-up to the 2003 Duma election, the presidential envoys in the federal districts were very active in instructing business as to which pro-Kremlin candidates to back in the single-member-district Duma elections in an effort to avoid a split that could let an opposition candidate win (Hale, 2006). The result, as is well known, was a breakthrough election, as a result of which United Russia was able to create the first constitutional majority for a single party in a Russian parliament since the Soviet era. Similar efforts at the local level have produced United Russia majorities in virtually all-provincial legislative assemblies as of 2009.
Woodruff, David. “Khodorkovsky's Gamble: From Business to Politics in the YUKOS Conflict,” PONARS Policy Memo no.308, November 2003, https://gushare.georgetown.edu/eurasianstrategy/Memos/2003/pm_0308.pdf, access date August 12, 2009. Compare: Markov, Sergei. 2003. “The Yukos Affair and Putin's 2nd Term,” The Moscow Times, July 29, circulated on Johnson's Russia List No.7269
Partly as a result of these actions and policies, business has become generally unwilling (if not actually unable) to back opposition parties without the OK of the Kremlin (Morar’, 2007). Yabloko Party representatives, for example, have claimed that Putin personally gave Khodorkovsky the instruction to fund their party prior to the 2003 election, and that their sources of financing almost completely dried up after the Yukos chairman's arrest. 14 Even the business-friendly Union of Right Forces claimed to have nearly completely lost its corporate donors after going into “hard opposition” against the Kremlin in the 2007 Duma campaign, a claim lent credence by a statement by Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists Vice President Igor Yurgens that an SPS led by the “more agreement-capable” Leonid Gozman would regain significant donations. 15
Interviews with Author.
Nikita Belykh, personal blog, http://belyh.ru, September 26, 2008, access date September 27, 2008; Vedomosti, September 29, 2008.
The idea of the Kremlin using formal and informal presidential power to coordinate business support for electoral purposes originated in the Yeltsin era, therefore, but the practices and policies of Putin and his allies have exponentially augmented the potency of this mechanism. Yeltsin was able to mobilize forces in an emergency manner to eke out a victory against a Communist Party opponent in 1996 and by 1999–2000 was again able only to barely defeat a challenge from a rival patronal pyramid, one led by Luzhkov and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov that had the support of many of the country's most powerful governors and representatives of business. Already by 2003–2004 and without question by 2007–2008, Putin had effectively combined all major potential subpatrons into a single political pyramid that was so tightly bound that few even thought a serious challenge was possible.
Why was Putin so much more effective in turning Russia's political system into something that might be described as “one big political machine” than was Yeltsin? One factor is probably political style. While a close examination of Yeltsin's record belies any claim that he is a true democrat, what we can say is that he was more tolerant of media criticism and, significantly, more inclined to trust in his own ability to mobilize forces to achieve an improbable victory against strong opponents than Putin has been. There is some evidence that Yeltsin even thrived personally on pulling off such political victories (Colton, 2008). Thus while he was quite authoritarian in some of his methods of rule, he mainly sought to rein in opposition when a personal victory was most essential, as in the presidential contests of 1996 and 2000. Putin, on the other hand, is a more cautious political actor who appears unwilling to leave anything to chance, leading him to take greater advantage of presidential authority to control the Russian political environment even when he could probably win handily even in a completely free and fair contest. Putin also clearly benefited in this regard from his background in the KGB and FSB. Especially as he proved willing to strike decisively against political opponents, potential political opponents were frequently intimidated and believed that he had both the power and will to detect and ruthlessly suppress political opposition. Thus even where Putin actually did nothing, there seems to have taken place a great deal of self-censorship and self-suppression, especially in the business and media communities.
Finally, there is a strong case to be made that Putin's very popularity was an essential part of his success in building Russia's “power vertical” and eliminating rival political verticals. Potential political opponents surely understood that a challenge to Putin, who from the moment he took presidential office enjoyed favorability ratings well above 50%, was unlikely to be greeted favorably by much of the population. This is especially true since many of those few who actively disapproved of Putin's job performance were already committed to the Communists, who were also clearly opposed by a majority of the population ever since the late 1990s. This, combined with the observed failure of opposition attempts from both left and right to mobilize mass support, served to disincline most incumbent central officials, governors, and business leaders from getting very involved in opposition politics.
The question of what this popularity is based on is a topic beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say that evidence points strongly to several factors. Most obviously, Putin has benefited in public eyes from a steadily growing economy (Treisman, 2008). In addition, he has created a sense of inevitability and stability about his rule that increases people's willingness to support him relative to the kinds of alternatives they can conceive as realistic (Rose, Mishler, & Munro, 2006). He has also taken policy stands that are both recognized and supported by the wider public, including opposition to a socialist economy, and has developed a personal style of leadership that people generally like (Colton & Hale, 2009).
Perhaps the most persistent problem for electoral patronal systems, even those arranged in a single-pyramid formation, is succession. So long as no succession problems loom, such systems can be tremendously stable and endure for years, even when crises of various kinds erupt. In the former Soviet space, we thus see that chief patrons of single-pyramid systems who have held contested elections but who have also generally been seen as rulers-for-life (including Azerbaijan's Heydar Aliev, Uzbekistan's Islom Karimov, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbaev, and Belarus's Aleksandr Lukashenka) have endured few serious threats to their power after they were able to construct their single-pyramid systems. The problem comes when elites begin to expect that their patrons may leave office for one reason or other in the immediate future. This expectation by itself, regardless of the thoroughness of monitoring and punishment mechanisms, starts to weaken the links between the various building blocks of the pyramid. Even a system of repression so refined as the East German regime collapsed almost instantaneously once it became widely believed that communist regimes were on the way out in the Warsaw Pact countries (Olson, 1990). The expectation matters is because the leader him- or herself, if he or she does leave office, is no longer in as good a position as before to punish those who “defect” to an alternative pyramid project. When people expect this to happen, therefore, they calculate that the chance of escaping punishment for defection rises and that the costs of defection decline – even before the leader actually departs. The odds of defection being successful rise when the incumbent or designated successors are unpopular because an opposition attempt immediately begins with the powerful resource of public opinion that can be used to mobilize street protests or make election falsification attempts harder to pull off. It is for this reason that each of the post-Soviet color revolutions took place at a specific point in time: After an incumbent president in a single-pyramid regime had announced plans to leave office and after that president's team was believed to have tried to falsify election results that would somehow influence the succession. 16 In short, moments of succession can create strong centrifugal pressures in electoral patronal systems, even those organized as a single dominant pyramid that ordinarily appears quite stable.
That is, Akaev and Shevardnadze were in their final constitutional terms and had announced that they would abide by them, and Kuchma had declined to run for reelection despite having the opportunity to do so. See Hale (2005).
The dramatic developments accompanying Russia's succession process of 2008 make a great deal of sense in this light. The preceding paragraph can be summarized in the proposition that single pyramids are most likely to break up during a leadership transition when the incumbent is (a) unpopular and (b) not expected to be in a position to punish defectors after the election. Putin's maneuvers leading up to 2007–2008 addressed precisely these two vulnerabilities. First, the great attention that the regime has paid to sustaining popularity (including everything from advertising the four National Priority Projects to tightly controlling how political events were portrayed on television) helped ensure that an opposition challenge would fail even if the political machine's system of monitoring and punishment actually broke down. Putin's broad support in the population created the impression among both elites and masses that whoever he supported in any election would win. Moreover, this popular support resource could conceivably be used by Putin even if he completely left office, since he always could announce a return to politics and presumably defeat a leader who had defected from his preferred course. Putin's decision to lead United Russia's party list in the 2007 Duma elections, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to simultaneously maximize United Russia's vote tally, thereby ushering a maximally large delegation into the Duma, and to demonstrate his electoral strength even outside the presidential election arena and even as his second term ended so as to intimidate would-be challengers. The great (and strikingly successful) effort to associate Medvedev tightly with “Putin's plan” also served to reassure both elites and masses that not much would change with the shift from Putin to Medvedev in the presidency.
Putin's decision to transfer to the post of Prime Minister seems strongly aimed at addressing problem (b). By announcing that he was not planning to leave politics, and moreover that he would remain in a top post with a great deal of power to monitor and punish defectors, he further countered the centrifugal pressures of the succession process. The decisions to become Prime Minister and to head the United Russia party list (and even to chair the party) were mutually reinforcing. While the president appoints the prime minister according to the Russian Constitution, the Duma must approve this appointment. And since United Russia achieved a two-thirds majority in the Duma thanks to Putin, few observers expected that this Duma would ever accept anyone other than Putin for Prime Minister unless Putin himself asked them to. Thus Putin's new post is probably best described not just as Prime Minister, which is a post highly vulnerable in Russian high politics, but as something like “PALORP” (Premier And Leader Of the Ruling Party), a post that has a great deal of authority to resist presidential initiatives but that has existed in post-Soviet Russian history only once, starting in May 2008. And, of course, Putin brings to this new position the considerable informal authority that he accumulated as president.
Of course, this shift from a patronal presidential system to one where the single pyramid is led by both a president and a palorp potentially creates problems of its own. Today, Putin and new President Dmitry Medvedev seem to be largely on the same page, if sometimes appearing either to differ on some tactical questions or to play a kind of good-cop/bad-cop strategy. But in principle, if they ever diverge on a significant issue, both sides have considerable power to struggle against the other. If Putin is indeed determined to eventually leave active politics, if his strategy has all along been to usher Medvedev into his new role as President and defend him from the centrifugal pressures of succession before retiring, then the system is likely to remain quite stable until the next moment of succession nears. But if Putin is merely seeking a new power arrangement for himself for some reason, then the tensions have a good chance of coming to the foreground at some point in the future since Medvedev may not always remain happy in the role of sidekick when he has the formally superior state post. If that happens, we may well start to see open president–palorp competition, and if neither side is capable of decisive victory, political contestation might become more than a passing phenomenon. This brings to mind an old conclusion of classic social science research: Democratization may not require actual democrats. Instead, it often results when political stalemate, and the fear of being annihilated by their rivals should they lose, drives leaders to create the kind of political guarantees and competition that over time generates democracy (Rustow, 1970).
One factor that can counteract centrifugal forces to some degree, social science research has widely documented, is the presence of an immediate foreign threat. For this reason, the events in Georgia of 2008 have been fairly convenient from the point of view of dampening internal tensions within Russia's political system during a delicate time of transition and new regime consolidation, just as these same tensions also worked to Mikheil Saakashvili's domestic political advantage as the patron in a similarly single-pyramid regime in Georgia. 17 Such foreign relations, so long as they endure, may indeed stave off any democratizing impulse that intra-elite tensions generated by Russia's new “tandemocracy” (or “two-tipped pyramid”) would otherwise bring. 18
For example, he frequently sought to discredit his domestic opposition as being witting or unwitting agents of Russian policy.
The term “tandemocracy” comes from Kommersant-Vlast, March 10, 2008.
Russia's political system can be fruitfully understood as an electoral patronal regime in which the most important actors are organized into a single pyramid of authority that dominates the electoral arena. This political machine was not built from scratch by Putin, but was skillfully consolidated using certain premade components that Yeltsin had given him upon transferring the reins of presidential power. But while the regional political machines, the superpresidential constitution, and the oligarchic corporate conglomerates were only loosely cobbled together under Yeltsin, and even then only mobilized fully during certain crucial moments such as the election cycles of 1995–1996 and 1999–2000, Putin fused these elements into a highly coordinated whole, a gigantic political machine with great staying power, surviving even the presidential succession of 2008.
Russia represents a certain pattern for electoral patronal regimes that is relatively common to Eurasia, a pattern characterized by strong and tough leadership tactics and regime popularity, a situation probably most closely approximated in 2009 by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The development of power pyramids in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan was interrupted by their respective color revolutions, episodes of competing-pyramid politics brought on partly by succession crises, but single-pyramid systems have effectively reemerged there too as of 2009. 19 Other than the Baltic countries, only Moldova and post-Orange Revolution Ukraine, with stronger parliaments than the rest, have sustained something closer to competing-pyramid politics, with its characteristic openness.
Freedom House's Nations in Transit report, for example, rated both countries less democratic in 2009 than they were right before their color revolutions: Goehring (2008).
This analysis, therefore, demonstrates that the logic of hybrid regimes and clientelist politics can be useful in understanding political developments in Eurasia. That is, the development of Russia's political system (as well those of other countries of Eurasia) can be more fruitfully understood as the development of a particular type of hybrid regime than as the functioning of (or the movement toward) either democracy or autocracy. And because hybrid regimes are so common worldwide but so underconceptualized and poorly understood, specialists in the Eurasian area who are oriented to the development of comparative political science theory will likely have a lot to offer world social science in the years to come.