State-society relations and the sources of support for the Putin regime: bridging political culture and social contract theory

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates two theoretical approaches to the popularity and resilience of authoritarianism in Russia, namely political culture and social contract theory. These approaches are two of the most important theories of Russian politics and also reflect the general divide in comparative and post-communist politics between political-cultural and rationalist explanations. We demonstrate that these approaches are bound up with different notions of legitimacy. This article suggests that neither framework offers a complete explanation of the Russian case. We develop an alternative framework that bridges these two approaches. Our analysis suggests that the social contract in Russia needs to be analysed as dynamic and conditional. Moreover, the use of different legitimation strategies by Russian authorities suggests that leaders can reshape the social contract and gain support in a strategic fashion by choosing appeals related to political culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• regime stability
• legitimacy
• social contract
• political culture
• Putin

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Magnus Feldmann is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.

Honorata Mazepus is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University on the EU-STRAT project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Notes

1 We refer to the “Putin regime” given the centrality of Putin to the functioning of the political system in Russia. As demonstrated by various data sources, the popularity of Putin and his regime is not highly correlated with support for various formal institutions in the Russian political system (Hutcheson and Petersson 2016, 1115–1116).

2 Many influential thinkers in the history of Western political thought, from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau to Rawls and various contemporary theorists, have viewed the social contract as an essential part of their theories of politics (Rawls 1971; Rosenfeld 1984; Waldron 1994). While there are interesting parallels between Russian approaches and social contract tradition in Western thought, we do not consider these questions here (but see Shlapentokh 2003).

3 It should be noted that this social contract does not necessarily presuppose democracy in Russian writings, at least not as conventionally defined in the West (Makarkin and Oppenheimer 2011, 1470). Makarkin suggests that Russians tend to view democracy as a system benefiting the people in socio-economic terms (hence, according to Makarkin, they view both Russia and Belarus as more democratic than an economically struggling albeit politically more open Ukraine).

4 There are some affinities between classical Hobbesian accounts of the social contract “as a means of creating a power capable of holding war at bay” (Forsyth 1994, 42) and the logic of such nationalist legitimation strategies.