Presidentialism and the Development of Party Systems in Hybrid Regimes: Russia 2000–2003

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between presidentialism and democracy by examining the role of parties in legislative bargaining in the 2000–2003 Russian Duma. Using a novel methodological approach, I empirically identify legislative voting coalitions to investigate whether the president's preference for party-based legislative bargaining prevailed. I find that in contrast to the 1996–1999 Duma, legislative voting coalitions closely followed party lines and that factions representing narrow interests were less relevant. The results demonstrate that presidential politics dominates electoral incentives in this political system and, more broadly, that political parties could be indispensable for regimes in transition to authoritarianism.

Notes

Presidentialism has been defended by Horowitz (1990), Mainwaring (1993) and Shugart and Carey (1992), among others.

A system with three or four parties of almost equal strength is especially conducive to instability under presidentialism as each of these parties will strive to implement its own programme either alone or in alternating coalitions (Cheibub 2002).

This is the number of effective parliamentary parties based on the number of seats in the Duma, based on Taagepera and Shugart's (1989) measure.

The Freedom House classified Russia as a ‘partially free regime’ (Freedom House, Freedom in the World, available at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=439, accessed 10 October 2011).

For instance, in 2001–2003, the government and the State Duma launched a reform of regional electoral rules aimed at improving the performance of United Russia in regional legislatures (Golosov 2004).

There are some restrictions to this right. The president cannot dissolve the Duma within one year of its election, or once it has supported impeachment charges against the president, or once the president has declared a state of national emergency, or within six months of the expiration of the president's term.

The president cannot put an issue to a popular referendum without the Duma's approval, nor can he block one. The president is not made the chief executive, but he can appoint and remove deputy prime ministers and other ministers without parliamentary approval. Still, these decisions have to be made ‘on the proposal’ of the prime minister.

In all Duma elections from 1993 to 2003, Russian voters had two votes: one for a national party list and another for a representative in a single-member district. The two tiers were not formally linked: there were no compensatory seats. In 2005, electoral reforms proposed by President Putin eliminated the single-member district seats at the expense of the proportional representation. Thus, all 450 seats are filled on the basis of party lists competing in the all-Russian federal electoral district. The reforms also raised the electoral threshold to 7%. The new system became effective in the 2007 election.

Studies of legislative voting in Ukraine and Hungary have not identified an electoral mandate divide (Herron 2002; Morlang 2004; Thames 2005).

To compete in the SMDs, candidates could either meet the signature requirement equal to 1% of the number of registered voters in the district, or run as candidates for a political party. They could also run simultaneously on a party list and in a single-member district.

The leaders of both kinds of legislative parties, those based on electoral parties and the deputy groups, could become members of the Council of the Duma (the steering body), and were entitled to office space, secretarial assistance, rights to recognition on the floor, and access to committee assignments. In the fourth Duma, elected in 2003, the minimum size requirement for factions was increased to 55.

Izvestiya, 30 January 2000.

For more details on the methodology, see Buntine and Jakulin (2004, 2006), Bagashka (2008), and Spirling and Quinn (2010) for a similar methodology.

Here I consider only groups of more than two deputies to be intra-party voting blocs. Decreasing the threshold for classifying a deputy to a voting bloc from 0.6 to 0.5 does not significantly change the observed patterns: a few additional deputies are classified to the already existing blocs.

The rest were inter- or cross-party coalitions (see Bagashka 2008).

Examination of the voting behaviour of blocs 3 and 4 demonstrates that an issue that contributed to the divisions within the Agrarian and Communist parties was the federal dimension (the centralisation of power from the regions to the centre). Bloc 3 was more supportive than bloc 4 of the following presidential initiatives: the Law on Militia in its second reading, which allows the president to appoint the heads of the ministries of the interior of the subjects of the Federation without consulting the heads of their administration; the Law on Police (Agreement Commission Version), which similarly increased the prerogatives of the president to appoint and remove from office heads and chiefs of police departments in the Russian regions without consulting the regional heads; and the Principles of Organisation of Power in subjects of the Federation, which aimed at checking the devolution of power from the centre to the regions that started in the Yel'tsin period. Thus the federal dimension, which became much more salient in the Putin period, seems to have exposed divisions within the Communist Party. Nine deputies nominated by the KPRF joined the Agrarian Party, which explains the cross-party blocs 3 and 4. The Communist Party is known to have donated members to ideologically similar parliamentary parties such as the Agrarians in order to help them satisfy the minimum size requirement.