Policymaking in personalist dictatorships: a theory of outbidding

ABSTRACT

This article offers a novel perspective on policymaking in personalist dictatorships based on outbidding theory. Originally developed with reference to ethnic conflict and terrorist organizations, outbidding suggests that individuals or organizations compete for support from their relevant audience, which produces predictable outcomes. I present a modified version of outbidding theory derived from the incentives faced by autocratic elites’ desire to avoid upward accountability and attract the favour of the dictator. I probe the theory’s plausibility for explaining policymaking in one prominent authoritarian legislature, the State Duma in Russia. Using two conditions “most likely” to reveal outbidding dynamics – the archetypal personalist regime of Putin’s Russia and the realm of electoral policy – I couple quantitative text analysis with rigorous study of legislative debates. The findings support the existence of outbidding behaviour in Russian policymaking, suggest that it may result in positive outcomes for Duma deputies, and substantiate outbidding’s effects on the repressiveness of public policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Dictatorships
• policymaking
• legislative behaviour
• Russia
• State Duma
• case study
• text analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the members of the Policy Processes in Authoritarian Settings Working Group at IWPP3 for their feedback that greatly improved the article. I would also like to thank Tim Peterson for his excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following Krol (2020), loyalists are legislators who are members of the pro-presidental political party, namely United Russia or Unity/Fatherland-All Russia prior to the merger.

2 Outbidding as a theoretical framework reflects a strategic interaction through which two or more loyalists observably compete to capture the dictator’s approval and therefore does not encompass individual sycophancy. Naturally, legislators may pursue individual sycophancy, but this may appear in public records as any seemingly extraneous attempt to have their fealty recorded and may not relate specifically to policy formulation. For example, legislators’ obsequious non-sequiturs that are not directed toward other loyalists may be one observable instance of individual sycophancy that would be distinct from the multi-actor, intra-regime interaction elaborated here.

3 Figure 3 may be interpreted as broadly consistent with this prediction: it reveals an increase in outbidding mentions across the Putin era, suggesting that intra-regime competition may have become fiercer.

4 The dictator may also indicate a desire for greater political control through executive-proposed legislation.

5 The passage of legislation itself can constitute a reward for loyalists (Krol 2017; Simison 2022).

6 In short, Quanteda manages (sorts, labels, condenses) and analyzes the content of textual data, such as books, speeches, legislative transcripts or Tweets, and performs the type of text analysis utilized here.

7 The list of keywords is provided in Appendix 1.

8 In 2002, no bills related to this legislation were discussed on the floor of the legislature; in 2018, there were no relevant discussions on this legislation by either loyalists or opposition deputies.

9 The characterization of the Duma as a “mad printer” during the Sixth Convocation has been noted in other areas of Russian policymaking, such as social and cultural policies. For example, legislation was passed “that restricted public homosexuality, banned adoption to the United States, and provided new legal protections for religious believers” (Waller 2021b, 13; see also Waller 2021a).

10 Under the LDPR’s proposal, four parties would be eligible to receive funding based on the results of the 2003 Duma elections, while the original legislation provided funding to seven parties. Rules that offer short-term electoral benefits, like those under the initial legislation that funded more parties, are often pursued by dictatorial elites to “make the incumbent party even more difficult to dislodge” – by reducing entry costs, these rules “successfully discourage opposition parties coming together” and allow dictatorships to “divid[e] the opposition camp” (Diaz-Cayeros and Magaloni 2001, 272).

11 The legislative transcripts from 2008 were dated before Dmitry Medvedev took office.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allison C. White

Allison C. White is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on public policy, elections, and corruption in dictatorships.