A surprising connection between civilizational identity and succession expectations among Russian elites

ABSTRACT

We know from prior research that non-democratic regimes can become vulnerable when elites anticipate succession at the top, but we know little about what shapes these elites’ expectations. This study examines connections between such expectations and Russia’s relationships to the outside world. Analysis of elite opinion data from the 2016 Survey of Russian Elites reveals strong associations between identifying Russia with European civilization and expecting Russian politics to display behaviors more like those believed to characterize European polities, including more frequent dominant party turnover. Elites appear not to expect their top political leadership to pay a political price for what they perceive as foreign policy blunders in a consistent way, though opposition elites critical of Russia’s actions in Ukraine are found to expect an earlier United Russia Party exit. Variations in threat perceptions are not found to influence predictions of leadership tenure.

KEYWORDS:

• Civilizations
• succession
• expectations
• authoritarianism
• elites
• Russia

Supplementary material

The supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. One indication of this is that the topic of expectations is essentially absent from issues of the Annual Review of Political Science, including from those articles on topics most closely related to that of the present study, such as authoritarian elections (Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009).

2. This significantly changed when direct elections for governor were eliminated (Reuter and Robertson 2012; Reisinger and Moraski 2017).

3. The author thanks participants in the Hamilton College workshop for suggesting this theoretical proposition, which was not part of the original research design.

4. The same has been said of elites in many other countries, including state leaders in Turkey (Hale 2014) and populists in Europe (Brubaker 2017).

5. It is thus not appropriate here to try to specify whether people concretely think that, for example, United Russia will leave power eventually because it will voluntarily give it up or because the Russian people will drive it out; the very general notion of civilizational identity is unlikely to shape expectations at such a level of specificity.

6. Derived from the SRE variables likelyputin and likelyur. Specific wording for these and other SRE questions used in the main analysis is provided in online Appendix A.

7. From SRE variable crimeaviolat.

8. From SRE variables ukrcisis1-7.

9. From SRE variables syria1-7.

10. From SRE variable fpusfear.

11. From SRE variable danoil.

12. From SRE variable eurciv.

13. The option “cluster()” is used in Stata.

14. The 2016 SRE also includes the variable likelywhen, which reports answers given to the question of when a respondent thinks it “likeliest” that Putin will step down from the presidency, giving them only the choices of before 2018, 2018, and 2024. This question gives us little leverage on succession expectations, since it is asked even of people who had just said in the previous question that they thought Putin was unlikely or very unlikely to leave the presidency by 2024 (79% of the sample). Nevertheless, if a variable on the timing of Putin’s exit from the presidency is created that uses likelyputin for those who think it likely he will stay on until at least 2024 and likelywhen for those who in likelyputin say they expect him to leave before 2024, we still obtain no clear, significant results.

15. Including only one of the accountability variables at a time does not result in any of them crossing the significance threshold.

16. From the SRE variables partymem and partyid.

17. Results in tabular format for the analyses reported in Figures 2–4 can be found in online Appendix E.

18. For convenience, the term “opposition” is used loosely in this study to refer to people who do not identify with United Russia in the SRE variables partymem and partyid. Some may, of course, consider themselves neutral and not actually in “opposition.”

19. From the SRE variable likelyelect.

20. From the SRE variable russyst.

21. From the SRE variable immigcrime. This variable is coded 1 for people who hold the most discriminatory views, so should be negatively correlated with European civilizational identity to the extent that the latter captures identification of Russia with more democratic norms.

22. From the SRE variable fphmnrht.

23. From the SRE variable comppol.

24. From the SRE variable europhil.

25. From the SRE variable RUS_N_EU.

26. From the SRE variable objwest.

27. From the SRE variable pridedem.

28. It was funded by National Science Foundation grant SES-1541738.

29. Results in tabular format can be found in online Appendix F.