Deinstitutionalization and the Authoritarian Citizen: The Politics of Uncertainty in Russia
Year: 2011
Type: preprint
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Recent research on authoritarianism has focused on the ways in which regimes manipulate the balance between institutionalization and tactical flexibility in order to maximize their durability, leading to a number of valuable observations regarding the genesis and evolution of elite pacts, ruling parties and the selective application of both repression and democratic tools of governance. Such research, however, has tended to focus either on the regimes themselves or on the structure of relationships between and within elites and/or other proximate interest groups. Rarely have these investigations ventured into the broader question of state-society relations. This paper takes Russia as a case of a regime that has opted for strategic deinstitutionalization both in intra-elite and in state-society relations and asks how that decision has shaped the content and meaning of political constituency, both for citizens and their rulers. Whereas institutionalized regimes provide a fundamental public good to citizens by creating predictability in social and state-society relations, regimes such as Russia’s govern through the manufacture and manipulation of uncertainty. In such a context, in which citizens thrive through the pursuit of individualized strategies, why do citizens need the state? Does arbitrary rule create demand for institutionalization, or for continued arbitrary rule? If the latter, what is the meaning of support and legitimacy in a deinstitutionalized political environment? These questions are addressed through a meta-analysis of polling data on Russians’ views on politics and the economic and social wellbeing of and outlook for themselves and their country. The data indicate a complex interaction between personal and collective uncertainty, on the one hand, and between those forms of uncertainty and citizens’ relationship to – and demands on – their state, on the other. This, in turn, suggests that durable authoritarian regimes can be built on a strategy of deinstitutionalized state-society interaction and that such a strategy – be creating, in effect, constituents for continued uncertainty – poses significant challenges for later democratization.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Samuel A. Greene
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1857489461