Who gets ahead in authoritarian parliaments? The case of the Russian state duma

ABSTRACT

Scholarly attention to authoritarian legislatures is steadily growing, and recent research suggests that there is substantial lawmaking activity and deliberation within these bodies. Does such activity matter for legislators themselves? Can it improve their career prospects? I examine the career paths of Russian national legislators, using a newly collected data set on biographies and parliamentary performance of politicians who served in the Russian State Duma in 2004–2016. I find that members who apply more effort in legislative work are more likely to keep their parliamentary seats, but legislative effort does not increase the probability of executive appointment. Rather, legislators appear to be recruited into executive offices on the basis of previous work experience or personal ties. Parliamentary service, however, may still help legislators get ahead by making them more visible to government leadership. My research highlights that legislatures may be used by authoritarian governments to improve the management of political careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Autocracy
• legislatures
• political careers
• political elites

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Scott Gehlbach, Yoshiko Herrera, Rikhil Bhavnani, Jessica Weeks, David Szakonyi, and to the participants at the ASEEES annual meeting (2017) and at various colloquia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 These parties are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), Just Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossiya, SR), and the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). They are allowed some autonomy, but their members consistently support the Kremlin's key policies.

2 While in the period of interest, Duma members were mainly elected via party lists, there also exist a number of barriers that allow to disqualify undesired candidates from running in single-member districts (Wilson, 2016).

3 In most cases, I have cross-referenced the data using multiple sources. Duma legislators are public officials who attract substantial attention, so there have been virtually no cases with substantial uncertainty regarding key points of their professional biographies.

4 While convocation 3 (2000–2003) also operated under Putin, it was elected before Putin came to power and under a different configuration of the party system. Further, the Kremlin's control over parliamentary elections tightened in mid-2000s, which affected career expectations. I exclude this convocation for the sake of comparability. Convocation 7, elected in September 2016, is not included because it has not ended by the time of writing.

5 Sistema obespecheniya zakonodatelnoy deyatelnosti, http://sozd.parliament.gov.ru/.

6 Voting and attendance data does not include two legislators, Leonid Korotkov in convocation 4, and Yuri Petrov in convocation 6, and these two legislators are dropped from analyses involving specific voting or attendance variables.

7 Each legislator is a vertex in the network, and each co-sponsorship is an edge. Betweenness centrality is the number of shortest paths in the network that go through a given legislator, weighted by the number of edges (co-sponsored bills).

8 In the appendix, I provide analogous results with an ordinal version of the executive appointment measure that ranges from 1 to 5 depending on the level of executive office.

9 Since there are many zeroes, the transformation takes the form of log$(X+1)$ for co-sponsorship and media mentions and the form of log$(X+0.001)$ for speeches and bill initiation.

10 Executive offices in this case also include governors, leaders of Russia's administrative regions, who were appointed by the Kremlin in 2004–2011. Since 2012, the Kremlin has returned to popular elections, but in most cases, these elections have been no more than a formality (see e.g. Sharafutdinova (2016)). Governors are important top bureaucrats, and dropping them from the model or implying that they leave Duma without an appointment would not be correct. In the online appendix, I report the models with gubernatorial posts as a separate outcome; results are similar.

11 Also see Table 8 in the online appendix. The coefficients come from the joint analysis of appointment and reelection; in this specific model, pro-Kremlin voting is included as the main predictor.

12 One might also be interested in whether career outcomes are affected by the mode of election, given that in convocation 4 (2004–2007), half of Duma members were elected directly by voters in single-member districts (SMD). In an additional analysis, I examine the behaviour and career outcomes of SMD-elected legislators from convocation 4. While these legislators were on average more likely to initiate bills and to engage in co-sponsorship (which could have helped some of them to secure reelection), there is no statistically significant relationship between the mode of election – SMD or party lists – and the probability of executive appointment or reelection. It is interesting, however, that SMD-elected legislators were more likely to get an executive appointment if they applied more effort in their legislative work, including bill initiation, co-sponsorship, and speeches. It could be that the Kremlin placed more weight on legislative work when deciding on career outcomes for SMD-elected Duma members, although it is unclear why similar criteria were not applied to other legislators in the same convocation. A more likely interpretation is that in this case, the logic of signalling competence was trumped by the logic of co-optation; in the mid-2000s, when the regime was moving away from SMD elections, the Kremlin wanted to co-opt the most active and capable SMD-elected legislators to prevent their opposition activity. Another possible reason for this pattern is that the majority of SMD legislators were representing their narrow regional constituencies or corporate sponsors, and they were not interested in productive legislative work or in executive promotions. For further details on this analysis, see Tables 13, 14, 15, and 16 in the online appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anton Shirikov

Anton Shirikov is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studies the politics of Russia and other post-communist countries. His dissertation project explores why citizens of authoritarian regimes trust propagandistic state media and how political polarization leads them to disagree about information credibility.