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Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin Nikolay Petrova, Maria Lipmanb & Henry E. Halec a Department of Political Science, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia b Society Program, Carnegie Moscow Center, Moscow, Russia c Department of Political Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Published online: 02 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: Nikolay Petrov, Maria Lipman & Henry E. Hale (2014) Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin, Post-Soviet Affairs, 30:1, 1-26
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2013.825140
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Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin
Nikolay Petrov a , Maria Lipman
b and Henry E. Hale
c *
a Department of Political Science, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia;
b Society
Program, Carnegie Moscow Center, Moscow, Russia; c Department of Political Science,
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
(Received 3 May 2013; final version received 17 June 2013)
This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weaken- ing of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts byRussianleaderstodisengage societyfromthe sphere ofdecision-makingentail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership’s best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation.Threecasestudiesofthepolicy-makingprocessarepresented:the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.
Keywords: hybrid regimes; Russia; elections; mass media; state; governance; democracy; authoritarianism; cash-for-benefits reform; Khimki Forest; public protest; substitution
Scholars now widely recognize that many of the world’s polities are hybrid
regimes, combining both democratic and autocratic elements in some significant
measure (Hale 2011a). But since existing studies still tend to focus on such
regimes’ prospects for democracy and how precisely democratic content is
subverted, we still know relatively little about their implications for governance,
which we generally define as the capacity of the state to perform for the benefit of
its citizenry (Zakaria 1997; Carothers 2002; Ottaway 2003; Levitsky and Way
2010). 1 We tackle this question head-on, building on previous work (Petrov,
Lipman, and Hale 2010) to investigate: What are the implications of regime
hybridity for governance? 2 Our approach is inductive, focusing on Russia as a
substantively important example of a hybrid regime that is also widely seen as a
q 2013 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Post-Soviet Affairs, 2014
Vol. 30, No. 1, 1–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2013.825140
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regional or even world innovator in nondemocratic practices (Carothers 2006;
Walker 2009; Cameron and Orenstein 2012).
In particular, we argue that Russia’s peculiar combination of authoritarian and
democratic elements can be understood as emerging from a series of what we call
dilemmas of hybrid regime governance. Here we focus on three: the dilemma of
elections, the dilemma of mass media, and the dilemma of the state. Each dilemma
captures one way in which institutions of democracy provide both risks and
benefits to rulers, giving such leaders reason to try to “have their democratic cake
and eat it too.” Their responses to these dilemmas create many of the pathologies
that are persistently evident in how the Russian political system governs. These
include a tendency to eviscerate formal institutions, the proliferation of what we
call below “substitutions,” and the centralization and personalization of ever more
control – even over decisions of seemingly minor importance – in the hands of the
top leader. The dilemmas of hybrid regime governance also allow us to account for
the regime’s efforts to avoid outright repression in some significant spheres. While
we will address later evidence that the set of such spheres has been contracting
since Vladimir Putin’s 2012 return to the presidency, we argue that the regime has
generally sought not so much to repress or respond to society as to disengage it,
governing by what we call a non-intrusion pact with society. This has been
sustained through clever manipulation – rather than blanket suppression,
censorship, or control – of media markets as well as the real provision of certain
goods such as economic growth and at least minimal levels of governance, thereby
enabling the regime to get away with as much as possible without triggering a
societal backlash. As a result, we find that the regime’s policy outputs have in
theory tended to be closer to majority public preferences than to a regime that
relies primarily on blanket repression, but that the costs involved in trying to
sustain this situation can become very taxing on regime resources and can
risk generating outcomes that minimize this difference with pure authoritarian
systems if the system is not managed well. We find that it also creates a significant
danger of the entire system breaking down in ways unexpected for the regime. In
the pages that follow, we develop the logic of the three aforementioned dilemmas
of hybrid regime governance and illustrate the consequences for governance
through case studies of the policy-making process in three areas: the 2005 cash-
for-benefits reform, the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up
to and following the eruption of major public protests in 2011–2012.
The dilemma of elections
Hybrid regime leaders face an important dilemma when it comes to elections:
contested elections create political uncertainty that can threaten authorities’ ability
to stay in power during election periods, but elections can also have major benefits
for the incumbents, including those that in principle can help them retain or
augment their power. Contested elections legitimize state authority, supply a
competitive mechanism for selecting candidates for public office and programs for
implementation, channel social tensions and opposition sentiment in constructive
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rather than destructive directions, create a peaceful mechanism for resolving
differences of opinion and interest in public policy, generate public interest and
hence engagement in the policy process, and incentivize innovation in policy-
making. Such elections also serve to structure political challenges around
particular procedures and points in time for which authorities can prepare;
otherwise challenges tend to come in more unpredictable forms (such as the spread
of spontaneous revolt, uprisings, revolutions, or coups) and with potentially much
more dangerous consequences for those who are overthrown (as the fates of
Moammar Qaddafi and Nicolae Ceausescu attest). As Robertson (2011, 12–13)
puts it, contested elections can constitute “a way to manage the disunity and
disorder that threaten all authoritarian political regimes.” Incumbent authorities
thus have incentive to maintain the benefits of political competition while
attempting at the same time to escape the limits it imposes on them.
Figure 1, while obviously a gross oversimplification of reality, can help
illustrate the implications. The vertical axis represents the gain that the leadership
expects from its relationship to state power, with above-zero values representing
(say) rents its members expect from being in power and values below zero
representing losses they expect from being out of power (for example, if they are
prosecuted for crimes committed when they were in power). The horizontal axis
represents the possible range of positions on an important issue, where the specific
policy desired by the rulers (on the far right of the horizontal axis) differs
significantly from that desired by society (represented by the point where the
vertical axis meets the horizontal). Policy B represents the policy closest to the
rulers’ own ideal for which they can win a bare majority vote from society in a free
and fair election. So long as the rulers stay within this range, between policies A
and B, free and fair elections do not threaten their hold on power, enabling them to
Figure 1. Hybrid regime rulers’ utility curve and policy-making.
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collect not only their rents from being in power, but also the benefits from a policy
that is a bit closer to their own ideal point than is policy A. In a democracy, rulers
will typically offer policy B because this maximizes their gain; if they attempt to
impose anything beyond B, they fall from power and thus lose all the rents from
being in power plus the opportunity to follow through on policy B (as is illustrated
by the bold dashed line labeled “ruler’s utility curve in democracy”). One key
feature of hybrid regimes is that rulers attempt to get more than policy B while still
staying in power, but at the same time not sacrificing contested elections entirely
because they derive some benefit from them.
In other words, hybrid regime rulers react to the dilemma of elections neither
by accepting free and fair elections nor by eliminating elections. Instead, they
manipulate elections and find other ways to minimize the chances that the
population will oust them, seeking to achieve policy X. Policy X still falls short of
the rulers’ ideal policy Z, as is clear from Figure 1, but it nevertheless is better for
them than what they would get in a democracy (policy B). 3 The ways that hybrid
regime leaders manipulate elections are well known, so there is little need to
elaborate on these here, especially since Russia is widely held up as a prime
example of a country that subverts the democratic content of elections while still
allowing some opposition on the ballot in major elections. These methods include
the use of formal and informal mechanisms to: filter candidates; give pro-regime
candidates campaigning advantages; hinder mobilization by opposition candi-
dates; make ad hoc adjustments of rules, borders, and thresholds to favor preferred
candidates; fill the political arena with “virtual” parties that may voice various
points of view but are still loyal to the Kremlin 4 ; and in some cases employ ballot-
box fraud and utilize indirect rather than direct elections (McFaul, Petrov, and
Ryabov 2004; Fish 2005; Ivanchenko and Lyubarev 2006; Kynev 2006; Morar’
2007; Gill 2012). 5 Of course, avoiding accountability for venturing beyond policy
B means that the Kremlin must limit not only the possibility of actual electoral
defeat but also the possibility of protests large enough to destabilize its rule. The
rulers have thus become known for a wide variety of efforts to disrupt the ability of
dissenters to coordinate, denying them access to obvious locations for spontaneous
rallies and channeling demonstrations to places where they are unlikely to attract
passersby or anyone other than hard-core activists. Other tools include the
systematic discrediting, marginalization, and repression of undesired protest
organizers and civil society activists, the intimidation of potential participants, and
the harassment, roughing up, beating, or detention of some who nevertheless show
up to undesired rallies (Robertson 2011).
But why, one might ask, does all this manipulation generate only X, not the
outcome Z that the regime would prefer? The answer is that just having some real
opposition on the ballot in elections and some political freedoms (such as
information exchange, forming organizations,and electionmonitoring) forces some
accountability upon the regime, compelling it to adopt policy outputs closer to
social preferences than it otherwise would. For one thing, the fact of an election for
the country’s chief posts provides a formal mechanism for removing the leadership,
and the presence of a genuine opposition figure on the ballot with supporting
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organizations and monitors creates at least some possibility that a different “team”
could come to power should public opposition to the regime grow strong enough to
induce key figures within the elite to switch sides in a bid for power as election day
approaches. Moreover, the greater the popular support for a candidate, the more
costly and risky it becomes to attempt to falsify results against him or her. Indeed, as
Tucker (2007) has argued, when the public is broadly dissatisfied with policy
outputs, stolen elections can serve to facilitate a social uprisingby providing a single
“outrage” (a stolen election) around which protesters can easily coordinate in
mobilizing this discontent and in reaction to which elites might choose to defect
from the regime. Even more importantly, the very potential that this can happen
makes the regime more sensitive to protests that might crystallize around major
events that do not coincide temporally with election seasons. Thus a ruler’s moving
beyond policy B creates some risk that a ruler will lose power to a rebellion,
represented in Figure1 by the slight decline in the ruler’s utilitycurve under a hybrid
regime that occurs beyondpolicyB. The more reliable the manipulation,the slighter
the decline will be. But there is still a point represented by policy X beyond which
the regime moves so far away from public preferences that a popular uprising (such
as an electoral revolution) becomes highly likely: if the regime moves past this
point, to policy Y in Figure 1, the risk of losing power becomes very high or certain,
resulting in the regime’s loss of both the utility it gets from staying in power and the
utility ofthe policy itself. The sharpdeclinein the ruler’s utility curve under a hybrid
regime after point X illustrates this.
The fear of such instability translates into intense attention to public opinion
trends that could facilitate it. Some observers have noted that Putin and his
strategists are almost obsessed over his standing in public opinion, leading one
analyst puckishly to dub Russia a ratingocracy. 6 This obsession with public
opinion has generated at least two important Kremlin strategies. One has been to
avoid undertaking highly unpopular policies and to back off at the first signs that
the leadership may have gone too far in an unpopular direction (i.e., at the first sign
the regime may have gone beyond policy X). This is illustrated most clearly in two
of the case studies we present later in this article: the 2005 “cash-for-benefits”
reforms and the 2011–2012 events.
A second Kremlin strategy has been to forge what we call a non-intrusion pact
with the population. That is, Russia’s leadership cultivates a sense that social
organization independent of the state – especially in direct opposition and outside
of the framework the state sets up – is useless, risky, and constitutes an improper
“intrusion” into the state’s affairs so long as the state is providing something
beneficial and does not intrude in people’s private pursuits or otherwise threaten
important qualities of life they enjoy. The “something beneficial” has included:
steady economic growth, Russia’s perceived return to global leadership, a sense of
stability, nonintrusive government, and a feeling that the country is being guided
by a strong and capable leader. Point X in Figure 1 might be understood, in fact, as
representing such a pact if we assume that multiple actual policies are collapsed
into this single dimension: Point X represents a set of policy outputs that are
distant from the social ideal, but that still represent that the government is
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supplying the population with something substantial that the rulers would not
provide if they did not have to worry about the possibility of ouster at the hands of
the public.
Mass opinion surveys supply evidence that the public has implicitly accepted
such a pact – at least up until 2011, when, as we will show in our final case study, the
pact partially unraveled. For one thing, the Russian public overwhelmingly agreed
throughout the 2000s that the state did largely deliver the main benefits just listed
(Colton and Hale 2009), 7 and new survey data confirm that such perceptions
remained stable through 2012 (Russian Election Studies 2012). At the same time,
public opinion research also shows that Russian citizens have not generally viewed
their government as an expression of their own will or that of the public. for
example, in 2007, near the peak of the regime’s popularity, a Levada Center survey
found that just 28% of the adult population tended to think that the interests of the
authorities and society corresponded (Levada Center 2009). The year before, the
same organization similarly discovered that nearly three-fifths of adult Russian
citizensfelt “absolutelyno”responsibilityfor whathappensin their country,withan
additional quarter feeling only a tiny amount of responsibility. These feelings have
not diminished: For example, in April 2013 the Levada Center found that just 10%
ofthe populationbelievethat those in power thinkabout the goodofthe nationwhile
41% say the authorities are only seeking personal privileges and income (Polit.Ru,
April 29, 2013). The essence of the nonintrusion pact, then, is that so long as
Russians see that the state does not significantly intrude into their private life
pursuits and is at least minimally delivering actual governance, they are willing to
put up with, and adjust to, dysfunction and even decline, such as the corruption that
most Russians agree remained constant or even increased under the Putin
administration, treating it with irony and detachment. 8 Indeed, while actual support
for the rulers is ideal, most important for the authorities is to avoid strong opposition
sentiments, with indifference or cynicism being nearly as beneficial for them as
active backing.
The dilemma of mass media
Of course, another way of keeping public opinion from becoming a threat to
regime stability is to limit or filter the public’s access to information. But this leads
squarely to another dilemma of hybrid regime governance: ruling authorities have
a strong interest in generating high-quality information that they can use for their
own purposes, but some of the best generators of such information are robust mass
media and electoral competition (Orttung and Rainbow 2010). And the latter, as is
well known, can also be generators of political unpredictability and challenges to
authority. Understanding this dilemma helps us comprehend the highly nuanced
way in which the Russian state has treated different media.
Contested elections and mass media competition can be important sources of
information that authorities can use to adjust policy and message so as to sustain
popular support. Electoral competition generates strong incentives for political
entrepreneurs to seek out and publicize information on policy needs and on how
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well authorities are performing in terms of policy development and
implementation. Mass media outlets face similar incentives under free
competition, as they are most likely to beat out their competition when they
best identify (potential) problems facing society. The effect is particularly
powerful when independent media and political competition are combined. 9 The
importance of such information can be seen by returning to Figure 1: without
roiling springs of information on what society really will or will not accept or on
what really will or will not work, authorities risk thinking they are adopting policy
X when they are actually adopting policy Y. This mistake, reflecting a relatively
small difference in the policy itself, can be disastrous for the rulers because policy
Y lies outside the realm of what society will tolerate and thus ultimately triggers an
uprising, perhaps one catalyzed by an election the authorities mistakenly think
they are in position to successfully “manage.” 10 Free media can also benefit rulers
in other ways, providing avenues for groups to directly access readers at the
highest levels of government and serving as a kind of safety valve for disgruntled
elites and masses, a channel through which their discontent can be vented and
diverted from action more threatening to the state.
Russia’s leadership has responded to the dilemma of mass media much like it
has responded to the dilemma of elections: just as the rulers have sought ways to
retain electoral competition while removing the risk of defeat, so have they
attempted to retain media pluralism while limiting its ability to generate threats to
regime popularity and finding ways to compensate for the information loss that the
limits entail. The most obvious part of this response already gets a great deal of
scholarly attention and does not need elaboration here: the regime’s
micromanagement of political coverage by the three main national television
channels (First Channel, Rossiya-1, and NTV) and the regional affiliates of the
Rossiya channel. Surveys find that these outlets remained the primary source of
information on politics for over four-fifths of the population even as late as 2012,
despite increased Internet usage. 11
Beyond these “commanding heights” of the media, though, there has
consistently been wide-ranging autonomy of political expression and even some
serious investigative journalism that works against state officials in Russia. These
can be found on the Internet, 12
publications that are widely read online but also
have important print components (including but by no means limited to Novaya
Gazeta, The New Times, Kommersant, and Vedomosti), and radio outlets,
especially Ekho Moskvy, which by the end of the 2000s was broadcasting not only
to the entire population of Moscow and St Petersburg but also to about four dozen
other cities across Russia. Throughout the 2000s there was even reasonably
objective television news coverage on some programs on REN-TV, a channel
accessible to most urban Russians, and news that differed somewhat from that of
the three main channels on the St Petersburg–Channel 5 network. Moreover, it
should be stressed that the people with the greatest access to these outlets,
especially urban and educated people, are the very kinds of populations from
which anti-incumbent post-election uprisings in other countries have drawn
heavily, as in Ukraine in 2004 and Iran in 2009.
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At this point, one might reasonably ask: Does allowing these free media to
operate undermine the attempt to control information on the “big three” television
channels? The answer is no, for two main reasons. One is that the broader context
in which these media operate, including stifled political competition and
emasculated institutions, serves to limit the effects of those free media that still
exist. Unable to get parliament to discuss their reports or the opposition to use them
effectively to challenge the incumbents, such media are unable to generate true
political events. A second reason lies in clever state manipulation of media
markets. Although the three main national channels do not directly compete in
news coverage (as noted below, their main news broadcasts do not occur
simultaneously), they are fierce rivals for audience share and advertising income.
They therefore attract viewers primarily to their highly professional and appealing
entertainment programing. Advertisers in turn freely invest most of their money in
these particular channels, which gives these channels even bigger budgets to
produce high-quality entertainment programing and limits the ability of other
outlets to do so. Viewers, initially attracted primarily to the three major television
channels’ entertainment programing, then tend not to touch the remote control
when the news comes on. 13
This effect is magnified because the market-driven
revenue disadvantage faced by REN-TV and other outlets also hinders their ability
to finance major investigative projects or to produce other high-quality news
material, making them seem less state-of-the-art. For such reasons, REN-TV’s
relatively balanced (if not fully free) news coverage was watched in a given week
by only 22% of Russia’s population during spring 2008 and 28% in spring 2012,
while the shares for news on the First Channel were 88% in 2008 and 84% in 2012,
for Rossiya 83% in 2008 and 81% in 2012, and on NTV 60% in 2008 and 63% in
2012 – despite the fact that only 12% reported not being able to access REN-TV
where they lived as of 2008 (Russian Election Studies 2008 and 2012). 14 The mass
audience of the three major national networks is, in an important sense, the
electoral base of the regime. Similarly, just as newspaper readership is relatively
low in many countries, including the USA, relatively few Russians are willing to
spend the extra time, effort, or money necessary to access news in ways other than
television. Accordingly, when asked in an October 2012 Levada Center survey
which media they primarily consult to learn about what is happening in the
country, 69% of respondents replied state television channels, another 10% named
private television channels (under which category Levada Center included both
NTV and REN-TV), and just 15% identified the Internet, 3% newspapers, and
virtually no one radio (Levada Center 2012, Table 15.11). And even in these latter
realms (Internet, radio, print media), people in Russia – much as in other countries,
including the USA – often choose their outlets based on their entertainment
component, with news content coming as a secondary consideration.
The Kremlin also hedges its bets, however. It has an abundance of instruments
for asserting control over any individual media outlet – including orchestrating a
change in ownership, applying pressure on businesses that own media or buy
advertisements, or finding a legal pretext to halt publication or broadcasting –
should it take on unwanted authority. Any of these steps is easy due to vague and/
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or overly specific requirements in the governing legal acts. The cases of REN-TV
and the St Petersburg Channel are telling: Yuriy Kovalchuk, widely reported to be
a Putin friend, acquired a controlling share in both channels, bringing them and
other assets together in a new National Media Group in early 2008. As these two
channels illustrate, a change in ownership does not necessarily mean an abrupt
change in editorial line: both have maintained some independence in news through
the time of this writing. They can, however, be brought to heel at any time by the
current (loyal) ownership.
The leaders have also deployed a huge array of substitutions to compensate for
the information loss characteristic of subverted, compromised electoral and media
institutions. These include networks of “public reception offices” across the
country, with different networks under the supervision of almost every major state
or semi-state organization, including the presidential administration, the federal
inspectorate, the United Russia Party, the Accounts Chamber (Russia’s equivalent
of the American Government Accountability Office), governors, and mayors. The
Kremlin also – more than ever since the USSR’s communist regime fell – has
undertaken elaborate analyses of appeals that citizens make in letters or visits to
these reception offices. In addition, it has relied heavily on opinion polls and data
collection by state security services such as the FSB as well as contracting
organizations. Recognizing the informational value of political competition,
Russia’s leadership has also sought creatively to foster “constructive” competition
within the pro-Kremlin camp that thus does not threaten a real opposition victory,
for example by instituting “primary elections” within the dominant United Russia
party or fostering “virtual” parties that espouse different ideologies but are closely
tied to the Kremlin (Wilson 2005).
The dilemma of the state
State strength requires the capacity to adapt to the diverse and shifting interests
that characterize any developing society (Huntington 1966). This capacity,
however, tends to go hand-in-hand with institutions that create uncertainty for
individual ruling authorities in politics (Migdal 1988). Institutions such as
parliaments that genuinely represent diverse social interests that may be changing
by their very nature are neither fully predictable nor obedient to rulers. Such
institutions, however, can also serve rulers’ interests by devising creative ways to
peacefully resolve conflicts of interest, guarantee the protection of key interests,
and guard against an executive’s ability to make foolish decisions that run counter
to the most important social interests and thus destabilize the state.
This dilemma of the state has some of its most important consequences in the
realm of interest representation. Let us take the example of parliament. One of a
legislature’s most important functions in a democracy is to provide a reliable set of
channels for the articulation and reconciliation of various interests that exist in
society. Yet since an independent parliament can constrain the authority of the
executive branch, it was an early and major victim of Putin’s growing power,
culminating in the elimination of single-member districts and the supermajority
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that United Russia captured in the 2007 State Duma elections, supplemented by
two other parties widely perceived to be oriented to the Kremlin and only the
Communists in plausibly credible opposition. With the ability of parliament to
represent diverse social interests radically curtailed, lobbying became an even
more crucial mechanism for interest accommodation, but this is one of the most
problematic elements even in democratic systems and the Russian version is much
less transparent. 15
Conflicting regional interests have been handled in a similar
behind-the-scenes way, and without public competition and open media, there is
little to keep corruption out of these consultations.
Such processes have tended to force the most serious conflicts of social interest
outside the framework of orderly politics, something both society and the state
generally have interests in avoiding. Social interests that find themselves excluded
from state policy-making are faced with a choice among multiple evils in trying to
achieve formal representation (Gel’man 2005): keep competing in the state’s
elections on the state’s terms and lose one’s standing as a truly independent
representational force (as many members of the business-oriented Union of Right
Forces such as Leonid Gozman opted to do by dissolving their party to create
Pravoye Delo); take the battle to the streets and oppose the system with all of its
repressive might, only to be branded as extremist and marginalized (as did former
Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov in opposing Gozman’s move); leave
politics altogether (as did Union of Right Forces founding member Irina
Khakamada); or seek to find informal channels to influence policy, which
nevertheless means ingratiating oneself to powerful figures among the authorities.
One result has been an increasing divide among incumbents (as represented by
United Russia) and the opposition, with the public increasingly losing faith in the
parties that are trying to comprise an opposition that still accepts the existing
system. The popularity ratings of Yabloko, as an example of the latter kind of
party, plummeted during the Putin era. In fact, while in 1999 a third of Russia’s
population professed some form of loyalty to one of Russia’s major political
parties other than Unity or United Russia, by 2008 this figure had dropped by more
than half, with no turnaround occurring by spring 2012 (Hale 2006; Russian
Elections Studies 2008, 2012). The main avenue for alternative interest expression
has thus become to go out into the streets, as will be illustrated in two of the case
studies below. 16
Russian authorities have compensated by devising an elaborate system of
substitutions. For seemingly every major institution of democracy that Russian
authorities have weakened in recent years, they have maintained one or more
substitutions intended to serve at least some of that institution’s lost state-capacity-
augmenting functions or to regulate or provide some kind of check on the other
substitutions or any remaining democratic institutions. The State Council is one
useful example. This is an entity that represents all of Russia’s governors, and the
president appoints some of these governors to the State Council’s Presidium on a
rotational basis. While not grounded in the Constitution, this system gives
governors on the Presidium direct monthly access to the president and special
authorization for policy initiative during their terms, affording them the
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opportunity to voice regional concerns about existing policy or problems of
implementation, to inform the Kremlin about the state of affairs in their regions,
and to suggest new ideas for new policy originating outside of Moscow. In terms
of Figure 1, substitutions such as the State Council are meant to improve the
Kremlin’s ability to design and carry out policies of type X (desired by state
authorities) instead of inadvertently winding up with policies of type Y (disastrous
to incumbents). Such substitutions can also plausibly help the Kremlin expand the
distance between policy B and policy X, increasing the range of policies that the
authorities can “get away with” before seriously risking losing power to a revolt.
The ability of the State Council to act in a genuinely representative way,
however, is limited by the fact that governors must regularly coordinate with one
of eight 17
presidential envoys ( polpredy) appointed to monitor and control
developments with the regions in their purview (i.e., in their federal district
[ federal’nyy okrug ]). Moreover, for much of the period when direct gubernatorial
elections were eliminated (2005–2012), some of the newly installed governors did
not even live in their regions prior to their nomination by the president. This, plus
the fact that the federal government exercised a high degree of control over
regional financial flows, made governors more directly beholden to the Kremlin
for their future career prospects than to their own constituents or the regional
interests they were expected to represent. One would also expect such governors to
be less authoritative in implementing and advocating for federal policies in their
home regions, less able to accurately assess local problems of policy
implementation, and less capable of generating fresh ideas for realizing federal
goals locally than would governors who had to stand the test of local electoral
politics, even with unfair advantages. 18
Because the Russian state has reduced avenues for interests to represent
themselves autonomously in hammering out policy, because the system gives very
little incentive for lower levels of government to try something new, and because
the system gives them little real authority to do so, regime leaders find that they
must take a huge amount of this work upon their own shoulders, relying on instinct
and personal skill in identifying potential points of social conflict and brokering
deals themselves. This personal intervention is less crucial when the country does
not experience any shocks or changes in social interests which necessitate reforms.
This was arguably the case for most of the Putin presidential years, when the
economy grew steadily without causing major social dislocations or raising
excessive expectations. But when such shocks or changes in social interests do
arise, the system requires direct and personal intervention from the highest levels
in order to respond effectively. That is, the system requires intensive manual
control by a small circle in the top leadership, as Putin himself interestingly
lamented in his April 2013 national call-in show when discussing healthcare
allocations, calling this phenomenon “a breakdown precisely in the system of
administration” (Putin 2013). This high level of micromanagement is fraught with
the possibility of missteps and requires a great deal of political savvy, problems
that will only grow as Russia’s economy and society develop and become more
complex.
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We now turn to three brief case studies: the protests over the government’s
cash-for-benefits reforms, the battle for preservation of the Khimki Forest, and the
political crisis of 2011–2012. These cases provide different vantage points on how
the dilemmas of hybrid regime governance described above play out in various
processes of state policy-making. Because the dilemmas typically work in
combination rather than separately, each case study is not intended to illustrate a
single dilemma.
Case study 1: the cash-for-benefits protests
The “cash-for-benefits” crisis of 2005 shows how stripping the system of
uncertainty-generating but information-providing competition and interest
representation can lead to politically unwise decisions. It also shows how public
accountability is ultimately imposed on the regime (in the streets), generating
instability. Moreover, this eventuality ultimately makes the government reluctant
to push through any major reforms for fear of such a backlash.
The events that triggered the protests began shortly after United Russia won its
first parliamentary supermajority in the problematic December 2003 elections,
signaling the legislature’s effective emasculation as a body representing and
empowering a wide variety of interest groups, and after Putin won reelection in the
March 2004 presidential race and had put together his new governmental team.
This newly subordinated State Duma then passed, with hardly any discussion, a
radical economic reform in record-fast time during the summer of 2004. This
reform aimed to clean up what were indeed some messy problems left over from
the Soviet command economy: various levels of the state had been obligated to
supply a huge array of in-kind transfers (often called l’goty – “privileges” or
“benefits”) such as free transportation, free utilities, and cheap medicine to a
variety of specific constituencies, such as retirees and war veterans. Aside from
being complicated to administer and highly burdensome to state and regional
budgets, some of these benefits were simply not being adequately distributed or
realized. As advocated by the Kremlin, the idea was to replace the set of these
benefits with lump-sum monetary payments that recipients could then use to
purchase the services they needed from providers. A group of Siberian and Far
Eastern governors (still directly elected at that time but declining in power)
lobbied in a public letter for the reform to be rethought and then revised, but this
effort was rebuffed. Sensing the potential for opposition, the government did
decide to put off the monetization of housing utilities benefits, but went ahead and
liquidated benefits for transportation and medicine effective New Year’s Day
2005.
The result was a major crisis for the regime. At the core of the crisis were
widespread public fears that the lump-sum monetary payments would not be
sufficient for recipients to obtain the services on which they depended. Moreover,
these fears started to take on very real form as pensioners started to receive higher
utility bills and to be denied free transport at the same time as promised
compensation payments were delayed. These were losses of a very concrete sort,
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and also had the feature of being “obviously” attributable to the central authorities,
a combination shown to be a ready recipe for public protest (Javeline 2003). Thus
in early 2005, what eventually became some 100 thousand people in at least 80 of
Russia’s 89 regions began to pour into Russia’s streets to rail against the reforms
(RFE/RL Newsline, January 20, 2005; February 14, 2005). The protesters were
mostly pensioners, who proved remarkably persistent and creative in forcing the
authorities to listen. One of their most attention-grabbing tactics was to block
roads, including a major highway in Moscow along which large number of State
Duma deputies and government officials were trying to return home from their
New Year vacations. The protesters also attempted to break into some government
offices. It is important to remember what was also happening around this time:
massive street protests in Ukraine had just swept an opposition to power in an
“Orange Revolution,” and some in Russia even began talking of a “Sittsevaya
Revolution,” referring to the cheap fabric worn by some of the elderly protesters.
The mobilization was largely spontaneous, although at the local level parties
(Communists more than others) were sometimes involved and there was clearly
the potential for this to have electoral effects should the movement continue and
the opposition harness it (Robertson 2011). Indeed, some 26% of the Russian
public expressed an intention to join the protests during January 2005. 19
This turn of events was evidently quite unexpected and terrifying for the
authorities, who had also not anticipated the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and
who thus feared that they might have badly miscalculated revolutionary potential
much closer to home. Panicked, the government moved quickly to compromise. It
gave back benefits to some categories of citizens, greatly increased the monetary
transfers given to others, and delayed some of the remaining reforms. As a result,
the government wound up spending more resources than it had attempted to save.
One of United Russia’s leaders and the head of the State Duma committee on
Labor and Social Policy, Andrey Isayev, later admitted that.
We were not able to explain to people the essence of this law, not able to control how this law would start to work, and not able to make those amendments that would have made it more understandable and more suitable. (Kholyavko 2008)
In his April 2013 nationally televised call-in show, Putin (2013) revisited these
developments and claimed that he had argued against them precisely because of
the possibility of a social backlash but relented, implicitly blaming his finance
minister for overreaching.
Even if one believes Putin’s self-serving post hoc remarks, this only confirms
the centrality of the dilemmas of hybrid regime governance we highlight: with
institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise gutted for fear
of losing political control, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to a
leadership’s guessing game as to precisely what society will accept and what it
will not, with a significant possibility of misjudgment. In terms of Figure 1,
initially the regime unwittingly introduced a policy close to point Y, but was
forced to retreat to something between policy X and policy A after social turmoil
had imposed significant costs and forced a hasty and poorly designed compromise
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partial reform. After these events, the fear of this unruly accountability mechanism
and the rulers’ inability to reliably tell in advance whether a given reform was of
type X or type Y appears to have cowed the government from undertaking further
bold market-oriented or other economic changes. Indeed, Putin (2013) essentially
admitted as much in April 2013, saying that while he agreed in principle that major
economic reforms were still necessary, they could not be undertaken immediately
or all together due to the risk of a public upheaval that could be even more costly in
economic, social, and political terms.
Case study 2: the battle for Khimki Forest
The battle for Khimki Forest 20
nicely illustrates the three dilemmas discussed
above from the perspective of the authorities, including the different ways that
interests lacking sufficient avenues of representation can force the top authorities
in a hybrid regime to respond and to find ways to cope with these problems. The
battle dates to 2004, when government representatives mooted plans to build a
new superhighway connecting Moscow and St Petersburg which would
circumvent the city of Khimki, which is just outside Moscow, by cutting through
a locally cherished forest that was registered as a natural landmark and unique to
the region around Russia’s capital. Backing these plans were a coalition of
regional governments, local authorities, and business entities seeking to profit
from the commercial use of a wide swath of land that would be cleared on each
side of the road. Also standing to benefit were the giant Sheremetevo airport
complex and its resident airline Aeroflot due to the expected improved access that
the new highway would provide, and possibly Transportation Minister Igor
Levitin himself. The road was intended to be the first in a series of projects
involving state-business partnership with Western investors, including the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European
Investment Bank (EIB), and French companies.
Local residents quickly mobilized against the plan, which threatened what was
for them a precious island of nature, a forest with centuries-old oaks. They
collected 20,000 signatures appealing to President Putin in defense of the forest,
held a series of protest rallies, formed the informal movement Ekooborona (Eco-
Defense), and created a website (www.ecmo.ru). The grassroots effort won the
backing of some significant allies, including Mikhail Beketov, editor of the
newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda that published articles critical of the highway
project and its effect on the forest. The Communist Party and Yabloko also leapt to
the forest’s defense, seeking popular support in the process. The protesters
managed to gain some significant allies in the Russian state during this process,
including the Moscow City Duma, the Moscow City government’s environmental
protection department, the Federal Agency for the Forest Economy (Rosleskhoz,
dissolved in 2006), and Oleg Mitvol’, a deputy head of the Federal Service for
Environmental Oversight (Rosprirodnadzor), who was attempting to boost his
own image as an independent politician. Bringing the challenge to the electoral
arena, Ekooborona leader Yevgeniya Chirikova managed with Mitvol’s support to
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win 15.5% of the vote in the March 2009 Khimki mayoral race, coming in third
place despite the deck being stacked against her by local authorities. The pro-
forest coalition even won certain key court decisions, including one to restore
Chirikova to the mayoral ballot after she had been disqualified. The protesters
were also able to garner support in the West, which was important because over
two-thirds of the highway project was to be financed by Western sources.
Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund took up the cause, appealing to potential
investors not to sacrifice the forest. In March 2010, the issue was raised in a Paris
meeting between President Medvedev and Russian and French business circles,
and Medvedev answered that he would look into the issue. In July 2010, the
Environmental and Social Advisory Council (ESAC) of the EBRD recommended
that the bank withdraw from the project so as to prevent the clearing of the forest,
and in October 2010 the European Commission declared that its structures would
no longer participate in the financing.
The local authorities throughout this period responded to protesters’ efforts
with brutal vigor. During the early phase of opposition mobilization, they shut
down large public hearings before discussion could start. Pro-forest activists were
harassed. Beketov’s car was bombed, then in November 2008 he was savagely
beaten. He was left crippled and unable to talk, and ultimately died less than five
years later. While Chirikova was later restored to the 2009 Khimki mayoral ballot
as mentioned above, her initial disqualification still represented significant
political pressure against her campaign. After losing a court case, the pro-highway
coalition got the Forestry Code (Lesnoy kodeks) amended to remove a ban on
rezoning natural forested parks, then in November 2009 Prime Minister Putin
signed order No. 1642, which placed much of the Khimki forest within an area
zoned for transportation uses. Reports later emerged that Putin had been lobbied
by Arkadiy Rotenberg, his former judo partner now in the construction business.
In December 2010, Rotenberg acquired shares in a firm holding a construction
contract for precisely this part of the highway (Newsru.com, January 12, 2011).
The project’s opponents took the case to the Supreme Court, but lost there. They
then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where the
case has remained since November 2012.
The battle reached a new stage when in summer 2010, before construction was
officially to begin, the pro-highway coalition started felling trees to clear the way
for the road. Defenders tried to interfere, putting up tents in the forest and holding
vigils there. They succeeded temporarily in halting the clearing. But then a crowd
of youths showed up in masks, evidently to remove the protesters by force. Local
police either failed to intervene or acted in the interests of the construction project.
Battles between the sides continued for about two weeks before the conflict took
an even more dangerous turn. During the evening of 28 July 2010, a group of some
200 youths ransacked the Khimki mayoral complex. Shouting “We will defend the
Russian forest!”, they marched from the railroad station to the city administration
building, where they broke windows, lobbed smoke bombs, and scrawled graffiti
before leaving the city on commuter trains. The citizens’ groups seeking to save
the forest disavowed any connection to the ransacking and had been peacefully
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protesting the clearing in the forest, but were arrested anyway and charged with
violating procedures for conducting public protests. They were released by
morning. 21
Forest supporters scored their biggest success the following month.
On 22 August 2010, a group of major rock stars, including the legendary lead
singer–songwriter for the group DDT, Yuriy Shevchuk, announced an outdoor
concert in defense of the forest in downtown Moscow’s Pushkin Square. The
police, however, refused to allow the amplification equipment into the square, so
the organizers turned the event into a “silent concert.” U2’s Bono, who happened
to be in town at the time on the band’s first tour of Russia, then met with President
Medvedev and demonstratively backed the efforts of Shevchuk and other highway
opponents. Medvedev then announced on his videoblog that he was ordering a halt
to the road project and calling for a round of new public and expert discussions on
the merits of the project. Interestingly, this was framed in part as an initiative of
the United Russia Party, which several hours before the videoblog’s posting issued
an appeal to the President calling for just such an order. Not giving up, almost
immediately the regional and local authorities behind the highway project joined
together with the pro-Putin youth group Nashi in Khimki to announce that they
had collected 20,000 signatures in support of the road project going through the
forest (the same number as had signed the initial petition against the project) and
called for a public hearing.
Medvedev’s administration clarified, though, that the site for the discussions he
had called for would be the Public Chamber (Obshchestvennaya palata),
a prominent substitution of the sort discussed above. Introduced by then-President
Vladimir Putin in 2004 in part to substitute for Russia’s “domesticated”
parliament, which was not serving as an adequate channel for policy innovation
coming from society, the Public Chamber brings together a handpicked set of
prominent public figures and members of nongovernmental organizations for
consultation. As Richter (2009, 42) puts it, “the Chamber was designed both to
attract and to contain initiatives from below in ways that would strengthen the
state.” When it met to discuss the Khimki forest issue in September 2010, the
unsurprising result was that a wide range of opinions were voiced and no
resolution reached. The body concluded only that it did not have enough
information to make a careful decision and called for additional expertise from a
greater range of sources.
The following month, Medvedev met with supporters and opponents of the
highway project, but again no resolution was found. Through the end of 2010, the
issue seemed to be in stalemate, with the only possibility for resolution being an
arbitrary political decision by the president and/or prime minister. In December
2010, President Medvedev and Putin’s government reaffirmed that the highway
would go through the forest, making some minor concessions to the pro-forest
coalition. The protesters immediately declared their dissatisfaction and vowed to
continue the struggle. Tree removal began in the forest on 21 March 2012, almost
immediately after Putin secured election to his third term as president, with
workers protected by special police forces and protesters staging sit-ins
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(Vedomosti.ru, April 19, 2012). In 2012, after the scandal-ridden mayor of Khimki
resigned, Chirikova ran to replace him and won a respectable 18% of the officially
counted vote, but charged fraud as the pro-development acting mayor won handily
(RFE/RL, October 15, 2012).
In the battle for Khimki Forest, then, we see exemplified many of the
consequences of the dilemmas of hybrid regime governance. For one thing, the
initial decision to rezone the land came from on high, handed down in hopes it
would be a policy of type X in the parlance used in Figure 1. In this case they
appear not to have guessed as badly as in the cash-for-benefits case, but getting
their policy came at a cost, suggesting it may have been somewhere between
policies X and Y. There was substantial popular opposition, but the Kremlin’s
emasculation of institutions such as elections and free media gave citizens little
option but to rely on other mechanisms to try to force accountability. This meant
physical resistance, invoking informal ties to influential players, appeals to the
personal interests of the powerful, and even taking their case beyond Russia’s
borders, producing what appeared to be an eclectic free-for-all battle of competing
interests and networks. Because the Public Chamber and other substitutions for
institutions of representation proved incapable of producing a resolution that
would be respected by the most powerful players in the country, stubborn conflicts
over essentially local issues repeatedly got bounced back all the way up to the very
top leadership, even to the president and prime minister themselves, forced to
intervene personally as an example of the manual control the system requires.
Thus we find the commander-in-chief of the world’s second-largest nuclear
arsenal devoting his own and his staff’s time, energy, and resources to deciding
what is essentially a local zoning matter, and having difficulty doing so given the
complexity of the interests that became involved in nontransparent ways.
Case study 3: the events of 2011–2012
The events of 2011–2012, rather than fundamentally altering the system as many
had initially hoped, in fact represented the same kind of wrestling by the
government with the dilemmas of hybrid regime governance that we have
described earlier, just on a larger scale. Top management, lacking information and
strong institutions, misjudged the popular mood and produced a public backlash in
the streets that then prompted it to make emergency ad hoc adjustments. These did
overcome the short-term crisis, but at a significant cost in the long-term ability to
provide good governance.
The crisis began with a series of political missteps that came during a steady
decline in the rapid economic growth that had been a linchpin of the nonintrusion
pact. Specifically, when it was announced in September 2011 that the same old
Putin was returning to replace Medvedev and that the whole tandem interlude had
been orchestrated from the beginning, it brought to a head dissatisfaction with the
dominant United Russia Party that had been brewing since rapid economic growth
had started to slow with the world financial crisis that hit in 2008–2009. The
party’s backers scrambled to manufacture the votes they now anticipated losing.
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One result was surprisingly clumsy efforts at manipulation and fraud in the
December 2011 parliamentary elections that were easily exposed. In some cases,
insiders themselves did the exposing, either disillusioned by the ruling circle or
upset by the gross manipulation – or both (Hale 2011b). Clear for all to see, the
egregious manipulation magnified public discontent, with the more educated
urban population becoming especially upset. Over the course of the fall, a growing
share of such people felt the need to do something, with unprecedented numbers
spontaneously volunteering their services as election monitors. After the official
results were announced and widely believed to be fraudulent, the outraged then
took to the streets as their primary avenue for holding the regime accountable. This
population, mainly urban professionals and intellectuals in Moscow and St
Petersburg, was essentially declaring its withdrawal from the nonintrusion pact.
Remarkably, these were largely people who had previously been apolitical, and
they were now declaring publicly that they would no longer turn their backs on
politics. They did so in numbers far greater than the authorities had thought
possible, populating a succession of massive rallies that peaked at close to 100,000
people (Gel’man 2012).
The regime’s response to this most major of challenges can be broken down
into two stages that strikingly resemble its response to both the cash-for-benefits
and Khimki forest crises: first panicky retreat, then new efforts to eliminate
sources of uncertainty thought responsible for the challenge to their authority. The
first stage involved a hasty, public, and immediate relaxation of some of the
policies that had caused the outrage to unexpectedly boil over. Because the central
rallying cry of the protesters had been to oppose fraudulent parliamentary
elections and ongoing closure of the political space, the regime quickly took a
series of steps: it relaxed strictures on the big three television channels to show
more opposition voices, gave official sanction for the major Moscow street
protests, greatly liberalized laws that had restricted the registration of new parties,
promised the return of direct gubernatorial elections, declared that web cameras
would be installed in all polling places for the upcoming presidential elections;
and replaced the Kremlin’s most important political strategist other than Putin,
Vladislav Surkov. 22
These moves shared two qualities: each was highly visible
and designed to be understood as at least some kind of concession, reducing the
impulse to sustain the protests, but, crucially, none of them changed the essence of
the system. The Kremlin thus remained able to mobilize a massive effort to get
Putin elected to the presidency for his third term on 4 March 2012. As in past
presidential campaigns, this effort included highly tendentious television
coverage, strong manipulation of the candidate pool, and tight restrictions on
campaigning. The campaign was successful in stanching the outflow of public
support, with Putin’s public opinion poll ratings recovering from their December–
January nadir. Protests continued, but began to dwindle in scale, no longer
reaching a size that the regime considered alarming. Election manipulation and
fraud were still alleged, just involving less ballot-box stuffing and more labor-
intensive methods such as organized multiple voting (RFE/RL, March 5, 2012;
Shpil’kin 2012).
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The second stage of the regime’s response to the 2011–2012 protest wave
began in earnest after Putin was safely re-elected president. It featured a selective
rollback of initial concessions, new pressure on key groups involved in the
protests, and an effort to shore up support among other groups by emphasizing
divisive sets of ideas that it had heretofore avoided politicizing. The selective
rollback and new pressure were designed to reduce the uncertainty that had
produced the unexpected protest outbreak, but to keep in place some of the
concessions that in fact could be used by the Kremlin to shore up its political
position. Thus one of the concessions that was retained was the law liberalizing
party registration: experts widely agreed it could be used to further divide the
opposition because parties were barred from forming multi-party blocs and
because Kremlin allies could form new parties designed to mimic genuine
opposition parties and peel away their support. These initial expectations appear
so far to have been borne out: as of late May 2013, some 71 parties were
registered, up from 7 in 2011, and none of the new parties has proven able to
register significant public support in opinion polls (Golosov 2012; Polit.Ru,
May 27, 2013). The authorities also kept the concession of direct gubernatorial
elections, 23
but set up a series of “filters” for getting onto the ballot that
effectively allowed incumbent governors and the president to weed out unwanted
candidates (Golosov 2012). The first elections held under the new system, in
October 2012, bore out these expectations and resulted in handy wins by the
dominant party’s candidates. Webcams were institutionalized for national
elections, but this was not regarded by experts as addressing the main source of
fraud and manipulation.
The limited opening of the big three television stations to opposition voices
also proved largely temporary and a new round of nasty coverage soon began. The
main television channels on increasingly rare occasions could still in 2013 be
observed giving some voice to major opposition figures who before the fall of
2011 had not tended to appear except in a negative light. For example, in February
2013, the First Channel’s weekly news round-up credited protest leader and anti-
corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny with forcing the resignation of United Russia
member and Duma Ethics Committee Chair Vladimir Pekhtin by exposing what
appeared to be undeclared property Pekhtin held in Miami. It even broadcast a
screenshot of Navalny’s anti-corruption website (Vremya Nedeli, First Channel,
February 24, 2013, 21:00). But such occasional appearances were far
overshadowed by major smear campaigns against many of these same figures,
with the first ones presaging a wave of unprecedented criminal prosecution of
political opponents. Most ominously, in October 2012, NTV’s “documentary”
film “Anatomy of Protest 2” effectively accused Sergey Udaltsov, a prominent
protest leader, of treasonous collaboration with Russia’s Georgian enemies aiming
to destabilize the country. This material soon became part of a criminal case
against Udaltsov and some of his colleagues.
In a striking show of teeth, the authorities also violently put down a protest on
the eve of Putin’s inauguration in May 2012, detaining or arresting many lower
level activists and later prosecuting about three dozen of them for organizing the
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violence (e.g., Herszenhorn and Roth 2013). Thus far at least two have been
convicted. Law enforcement organs later launched a number of criminal
investigations on formally unrelated matters against other key figures in the protest
movement, including Navalny. New legislation adopted in 2012 set the stage for
still further political closure. One measure required that any NGOs accepting
grants from abroad and engaging in “political activity” (defined so liberally as
even to include reporting public opinion poll results) to register as a “foreign
agent.” Another broadened the definition of treason to include cooperation with
international organizations deemed to be operating “against the security of
Russia” (RFE/RL, November 14, 2012). The US Agency for International
Development (USAID) was then asked to cease operations in Russia, and a series
of new repressive laws came into effect. In spring 2013, hundreds of foreign-
funded nongovernmental organizations (ranging from the Golos election
observation organization to organizations addressing medical needs) were hit
with a wave of inspections by multiple agencies all at once, including tax
authorities and prosecutors, requiring huge volumes of paperwork that bogged
them down (RFE/RL, March 25, 2013). In April 2013, many of these
organizations, including Golos and the human rights group Memorial, were
warned that they needed to register as foreign agents, and Golos was issued a
massive fine for its refusal to do so (RFE/RL, April 25, 2013; April 30, 2013).
Now involved in a head-on political clash with a large share of its urban and
educated population, the country’s leadership sought new ways to shore up
support among the rest of the population. It did so by stressing social conservatism
in ways it had previously avoided, because these issues could be very divisive. But
with so many cosmopolitan Muscovites already lost, the regime now felt it could
afford to appeal to a “real Russia” in the hinterlands, even though this would
constitute an unwanted intrusion into the personal affairs of the restive urbanites.
The first major salvo in this effort was the arrest of three members of the protest-art
collective “Pussy Riot,” mobilizing a conservative Orthodox Christian base that
easily came to see blasphemy in the masked women’s anti-Putin “punk prayer” in
Christ the Savior Cathedral. The dominant United Russia Party also newly
politicized the issue of gay rights, spearheading movements across Russia against
what they called homosexual “propaganda.” In June 2013, the State Duma banned
distributing “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors and passed
a bill on blasphemy under which people could be fined or even imprisoned for
offending “feelings of religious believers” (The Moscow Times, June 11, 2013;
RFE/RL, June 11, 2013). Anti-American themes – also present in the smear
campaign against the protest movement, the departure of USAID, and the criminal
cases against protesters – featured in the social conservative turn as well. This was
most dramatically evident in the emotionally charged decision to completely ban
American adoptions of Russian orphans, a decision supported by sensationalistic
coverage on the major television channels. Soon calls were afoot to ban adoption
of Russian orphans by foreign same-sex couples. Putin also personally ordered the
production of a single history book intended to shape the school curriculum in new
ways.
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By mid-2013, then, the Kremlin’s nonintrusion pact was in tatters in the eyes of
many mega-city residents: the latter were now “intruding” in politics with great
vigor, seeking to replace Putin, while the Kremlin was now encroaching on
personal freedoms they valued. But the pact was still in force with much of the rest
of the population, which did not see the social conservative turn as unwanted
intrusion into personal affairs and instead often approved of what they saw as
measures aiming to improve national morals. For example, one survey found that
88% of the adult population approved of the bill on homosexual propaganda in
early June 2013 (VTsIOM 2013). The latter population continued to supply the
ruling authorities with substantial support, or at least to remain politically inactive,
as of mid-2013 (Vedomosti.ru, April 11, 2013).
The case of the 2011–2012 protest crisis thus echoes the regime dynamics
observed in the Khimki forest and cash-for-benefits cases, dynamics that can be
understood as ways authorities wrestle with various dilemmas of hybrid regime
governance. With free channels of representation and information stifled for fear
of the attendant political risks, successful policy-making involves a kind of
guessing game as to just how much the authorities can get away with before
provoking a backlash that spills into the streets. Misjudgment, mistaking a policy
Y for a policy X in terms of Figure 1, can destabilize the polity and create high
costs for the rulers themselves, as they resort to ad hoc measures in a struggle to
regain control. In this case, the costs included not only the great administrative
effort that had to be applied to regain control, but also the sacrifice of part of the
nonintrusion pact. Because this part of the pact had helped underpin the regime’s
rule for most of the Putin era, its weakening portends a possible long-term cost as
well. Thus there is new pressure upon the regime to find novel ways to connect
with the population at the same time that its ability to do so is weakened by the
renewed crackdown on institutions supplying information and interest
representation, not to mention the slowdown of economic growth relative to the
average in the 2000s.
Conclusions
This article has argued that how hybrid regimes supply governance can be better
understood by looking at certain dilemmas that their rulers face. These dilemmas
grow out of the observation that institutions of democracy such as elections and
free media bring not only risks, but also benefits to these rulers themselves. In a
very real sense, such leaders can be thought of as actually desiring democracy, but
also having an even greater desire to be sure they always win democracy’s
contests. This prompts them to seek creative ways to satisfy both desires as best
they can.
In our examination of Russia, we see that the ruling authorities under Putin
have systematically gutted democratic institutions, but also that this has come at a
major cost for them personally when it comes to policy-making. Without free
sources of information and open avenues for interest representation, policy-
making has become something of a guessing game as to how much the authorities
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can get away with doing or not doing before a social uprising ensues. The case
studies show that the risks are real and potentially costly for both society and the
rulers themselves.
The rulers thus must regularly attempt to find creative ways to compensate for,
and thus minimize the consequences of, a mistaken call. These attempts at
compensation have included the creation of substitutions to replace emasculated
institutions, the forging of a non-intrusion pact with the population, and constant
ad hoc manual adjustments made by the very top leadership. But our case studies
show that these efforts are imperfect at best. Instead, they create a situation in
which major policy-making misjudgments are likely and in which – crucially –
their consequences tend to play out in the streets and in backroom political
wrangling. In fact, one might say that street unrest constitutes a “normal”
mechanism for interest representation and the exercise of accountability in hybrid
regimes like Russia’s. Judging from the Russian experience, the typical regime
response would appear to be slapdash concession packages designed to defuse the
tensions, followed by subsequent efforts to crack down on the sources of political
uncertainty that generated the crisis in the first place. The crackdowns then
exacerbate the regime’s policy-making difficulties, pressuring it to find ever new
sources of information, creative ways to facilitate interest representation, and
novel ideas for connecting with the electorate. During the 2000s, strong economic
growth and Putin’s ability to supply certain other goods helped reduce the potency
of the dilemmas of hybrid regime governance in the short term, as did the regime’s
reluctance to adopt major reforms that might risk social unrest. But the 2011–
2012 protests suggest that long-term challenges may be building, making it
increasingly difficult for regime leaders to escape the dilemmas’ horns. This puts a
premium on skilled and creative leadership at the same time that the system tends
to stifle the political rise of many skilled and creative cadres.
Acknowledgments
Hale thanks the Woodrow Wilson Institute’s International Center for Scholars’ Kennan Institute for supporting him under a Title VIII Research Fellowship during 2009, and all authors are grateful for the feedback of many people, including George Breslauer, James Collins, and participants of discussions organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.
Notes
1. Works documenting Russia’s democratic deficiencies are legion, including Baker and Glasser (2005), Fish (2005), Gessen (2012), Gel’man (2013), Hill and Gaddy (2013), Orttung (2013), and Shevtsova (2013). Mendras (2012) examines what she calls Russia’s “state weakness,” but not governance as such. One study that explicitly treats governance in Russia but that is not focused on the impact of regime hybridity politics is Colton and Holmes (2006). Studies that do find correlation between hybrid regimes and important aspects of governance include Goldstone et al. (2010, on state failure) and Kenyon and Naoi (2010, on business confidence).
2. See also the more elaborate definition in Kaufmann (2004, 8):
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The set traditions and formal and informal institutions that determine how authority is exercised in a particular country for the common good, thus encompassing: (1) the process of selecting, monitoring, and replacing governments; (2) the capacity to formulate and implement sound policies and deliver public services; and (3) the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them.
3. A key assumption here, supported by the research cited in the previous paragraph but beyond the scope of this particular paper, is that the rulers perceive that the benefits they derive from regularly holding at least partially contested elections is greater than the value they attach to the distance between policy Z and policy X, factoring in the risk they perceive that even fully dictatorial leaders can be overthrown.
4. We use this as a shorthand to refer to central state authorities and their networks of collaborators.
5. For overviews of world practice, see Hale (2011a) and Schedler (2006). 6. The Russian term he invented was reitingokratiya (Shmelev 2007, 55). 7. Striking evidence of the link between economic growth and presidential popularity
in Russia during this same period appears in Treisman (2011). 8. As of 2008, only 15% thought that corruption had decreased during Putin’s first two
terms in office, with 40% reporting no change and 38% saying it had increased (Russian Election Studies 2008).
9. One classic example comes from economist Sen (1999), who argues that no famine has ever occurred in a democracy, even though many democracies have been extremely poor.
10. Huntington (1991) calls such occurrences “stunning elections” and argues they are not uncommon.
11. According to the Russian Election Studies (2008, 2012) surveys, television was the primary source of political information for 89% in spring 2008 and 83% in spring 2012.
12. Sidorenko (2010) reports about one-third of the population used the Internet as of 2010, a share that had expanded to over half of the population in 2012 (Russian Election Studies 2012).
13. Adjacent programing is considered a strong influence on the choice of news programing to watch in the USA as well.
14. The percentages do not total to 100 because people can watch more than one news program, especially because the channels typically broadcast their main news programs at different times.
15. For example, Russia lacks a law on lobbying. 16. For an interesting examination of why some challenges to authoritarian rulers are
electoral, whereas others resort to street protests, see Koesel and Bunce (2012). 17. Seven prior to the 2010 creation of the North Caucasus Federal District. 18. Konitzer (2005) shows that even the highly corrupt gubernatorial elections of the
1990s and early 2000s produced a significant modicum of accountability for governors before their constituents.
19. A Levada Center poll (RFE/RL Newsline, January 27, 2005) found that 41% blamed the federal government, 31% singled out Putin, and 22% named the Duma.
20. For further details on the origins of this case, see Lipman and Petrov (2010). 21. On the complexities of this incident, see Komsomolskaya Pravda, August 11, 2010. 22. Surkov went from the presidential administration to a position in government as
deputy prime minister in charge of the apparatus, ultimately leaving this post in the spring of 2013.
23. In 2013, regions were allowed to opt out of direct elections, but the Kremlin indicated that this was mainly for the North Caucasus, and most other regions appeared at the time of this writing to be planning on direct elections.
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- Abstract
- The dilemma of elections
- The dilemma of mass media
- The dilemma of the state
- Case study 1: the cash-for-benefits protests
- Case study 2: the battle for Khimki Forest
- Case study 3: the events of 2011-2012
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- References
