Russias 1996 Presidential Election The End Of Polarized Politics

The 1996 Russian presidential election is a crucial referendum on the policy of economic reform that had been conducted over the previous five years. This book, written before the election on the basis of two major public opinion surveys at the time of the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections, explores the evolution in Russian thinking, the positions and strategies of the candidates, and the dilemma of the centrists choosing between a president they profoundly dislike and a Communist party they do not trust. In the 1990s, the northern regions of Russia supported free-trade reform and the southern regions protectionism, but this reversed the more normal pattern found in Russian politics a century ago. As the book looks at the psychological and sociological factors that produced the politics of the early 1990s and began to transform it in a more "normal" direction in the mid-1990s, it goes beyond a simple analysis to discuss the more enduring problems of economic and political reform in Russia. A Brookings Occasional Paper

What went wrong in Russia's decade-old post-communist transition? A group of leading young scholars answer this question by offering assessments of five crucial political arenas during the Yeltsin era: elections, executive-legislative relations, interactions between the central state and the regions, economic reforms, and civil-military relations. All of the contributors recognize that adverse historical legacies have complicated Russian democratization. They challenge structural explanations that emphasize constraints of the pre-existing system, however, and concentrate instead on the importance of elite decisions and institution-building. The authors agree that elites' failure to develop robust political institutions has been a central problem of Russia's post-communist transition. The weakness of the state and its institutions has contributed to a number of serious problems threatening democratic consolidation. These include the tensions between the executive and the legislature, the frail infrastructure for successful market reform, and the absence of proper civilian control over the armed forces.

A comprehensive reader composed of landmark selections, guided by the insight that to understand contemporary Russia, students need to know that there are strongly competing interpretations of Russian politics, both past and present.

This study demonstrates that in a time of massive change characterized by the emergence of entirely new political systems and a fundamental reorganization of economic life, systematic patterns of economic conditions affecting election results at the aggregate level can in fact be identified during the first decade of post-communist elections in five post-communist countries: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. A variety of theoretical arguments concerning the conditions in which these effects are more or less likely to be present are also proposed and tested. Analysis is conducted using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral indicators, and features both broadly based comparative assessments of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analyses of pairs of individual elections.

For a decade Russia has been building a new political order. This collection of essays offers a progress report on this effort, recording the projects for institutional reform, their successes and their many failures. Institutions covered include the presidency, the State Duma, regional government, the judiciary, the 'power ministries', the foreign policy and economic policy making establishments. Other chapters examine popular attitudes towards institutions and the crises of state-society relations in Russia.

In the early 1990s, competitive elections in the Russian Federation signaled the end of the authoritarian political system dominated by a single political party. More than ten years and many elections later, a single party led by Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to end Russia's democratic experiment. Russia's experience with new elections is not unique but it does challenge existing theories of democratic consolidation by showing that competitive elections cannot guarantee successful democratic consolidation. This book explores the conditions under which electoral competition contributes to democratic development by examining impact of elections on democratic consolidation. The theoretic framework focuses on the construction of infrastructure that transforms competitive elections into mechanisms of democratic development and shows how candidates for national parliamentary office systematically chose electoral strategies that undermined Russia's democratic foundation and created the conditions for a new single party autocracy to emerge.

Russian domestic politics has long been both labyrinthine and pragmatic, at once both inordinately complex and breathtakingly dynamic. The same can be said of Russia's foreign policy, in particular in relations with former Soviet republics. Any study of Russian foreign policy comes back to the intriguing question of why Russia, long perceived as an inveterate imperial power, would refuse to take back a handsome portion of its former empire - a portion that offers a bridge to Europe and an advantageous geostrategic position. Despite formal declarations, Russia has made little progress in achieving union with its ex-Soviet neighbour, Belarus. Linking Russia's foreign policy to its domestic politics, Alex Danilovich clarifies this paradox and explains why specific attempts to reunify Russia and Belarus failed, contrary to the desires of significant forces on both sides and to certain theory-based expectations.

Russia, once seen as America's greatest adversary, is now viewed by the United States as a potential partner. This book traces the evolution of American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, and later Russia, during the tumultuous and uncertain period following the end of the cold war. It examines how American policymakers—particularly in the executive branch—coped with the opportunities and challenges presented by the new Russia. Drawing on extensive interviews with senior U.S. and Russian officials, the authors explain George H. W. Bush's response to the dramatic coup of August 1991 and the Soviet breakup several months later, examine Bill Clinton's efforts to assist Russia's transformation and integration, and analyze George W. Bush's policy toward Russia as September 11 and the war in Iraq transformed international politics. Throughout, the book focuses on the benefits and perils of America's efforts to promote democracy and markets in Russia as well as reorient Russia from security threat to security ally. Understanding how three U.S. administrations dealt with these critical policy questions is vital in assessing not only America's Russia policy, but also efforts that might help to transform and integrate other former adversaries in the future.

Reexamining Economic and Political Reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: Generations, Ideas, and Changes analyzes the impact of generational changes and ideational changes on major political and economic reforms conducted in Russia during the late twentieth century. This book examines how the policy agenda was shaped by the ideas of the generations’ representatives for the “sixtiers” and “seventiers.” Representatives of the generation of “sixtiers” conducted reforms from 1985 to 1991 and invested major efforts in political liberalization but did not pay enough attention to economic reforms. On the other hand, the reformers from the generation of “seventiers,” who were in charge of policy making from 1991 to 1998, were genuinely oriented toward market building but rather insensitive to the democratization of the political regime. This book explores how these differences in ideational agendas produced inconsistent and controversial outcomes from both stages of reforms.