Institutional factors and Russian political parties: the changing needs of regime consolidation in a neo-patrimonial system

Abstract

Presidentialism and other institutional factors have been major influences on the development of Russia's party system. Why and how they have influenced party development has changed over time. This article looks at these changes and explains them as a response to the evolving neo-patrimonial system in Russia. Rules establishing electoral institutions have been particularly important and have been changed according to the needs of regime stability. Russian party development has flowed and ebbed as a result, particularly as electoral rules have changed. One function of parties under Yeltsin was as vehicles that signalled which interests had to be negotiated with by Yeltsin or incorporated into the regime. Under Putin, and as rules have changed, this function ended, and United Russia as the paramount party became a vehicle for controlling interests instead. The article ends with some speculation about the sustainability of this pattern of political development.

Keywords:

• Russian Federation
• political parties
• Putin
• patrimonialism

Notes

Statism is in quotation marks here because Putin's statism is not necessarily that empowering of the state per se as much as the regime under Putin. Rather, it is a simulation of state power that has particularly grown up since 2000 based on the perception that Putin is all about the state and desirous of developing its power. The quotation marks describe the gap between statist intentions and delivery of state capacity. On Putin's simulation of state power, see Holmes (2002).

It should be noted that we are talking about neo-patrimonialism as a system here, rather than neo-patrimonialism as a narrow regime type ‘in which the leader treats the state as his private fiefdom and gives only rhetorical attention to formal political institutions’ (cf. Brownlee 2002, p. 37).

On patrimonial communism, see Kitschelt et al. (1999, pp. 21–24) and Hale (2007, pp. 227–250). On the USSR's tendency to create networks of affinity and mutual support, see Urban (1985). For an analysis of how the formal system needed the ‘second polity’ of patronage to function, see Willerton (1992, especially 230–241) for a comparison of Soviet to other forms of patronage politics.

For details on the 1999 election and their relationship to the presidential election of 2000, see Gel'man et al. (2002). Biographies of Unity and Fatherland-All Russia can be found in McFaul et al. (2000).

For more on the law and some later rule changes, see Mikhaleva (2009, pp. 239–253 and pp. 278–285); Borisov and Zaslavsky (2005). The latter includes the text of the 2001 law on parties with its amendments to 2004. Discussions in English include Bacon (2004), Wilson (2006, 2007), and Smyth et al. (2007).

A Just Russia was created in 2006. The intention behind its formation, according to some analysts (and its leader), was to soak up votes that had in 2003 gone to the Rodina electoral bloc (barred like other electoral coalitions for the 2007 race, and rolled into A Just Russia) and to stop them from going to the CPRF or Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats (see Abdullaev 2006, Sakwa 2011, p. 19, Sestanovich 2007, p. 123).

See, for example, the speech by Gryzlov (2007), the Duma's chair and leader of United Russia in a speech in May 2007. United Russia, Gryzlov argued, was realising ‘Putin's plan’, a plan that had been around since 2000 (although only now labelled as such). The plan as Gryzlov presents it has no social philosophy behind it; it is just a series of aspirations for such things as achieving national economic competitiveness. Putin's plan, in other words, is defined in the moment and in Putin's actions, which can be statist or marketising according to need and whatever he decides the balance between should be at a particular point in time.

As Smyth et al. (2007, p. 135) put it, the ‘success or failure of the party will hinge on the development of internal party institutions that enable the party to legislate and implement policy and constrain party elites … ’.