The Dynamics Of Sub National Authoritarianism

International experts on Russian regional politics, including top scholars from Britain, Canada, Russia and the USA, provide critical evaluations of the multiple deficiencies to be found in Russia's sub-national authoritarianism, including: principal-agent problems in the relations between the layers of the 'power vertical', unresolved issues of regime legitimacy that have resulted from manipulative electoral practices and the inefficient performance of regional and local governments.

In the 1990s, sub-national authoritarian regimes - local-based monopolies of ruling elites - emerged in many of Russia's regions and cities against the background of spontaneous decentralization of government and competitive electoral politics. In the 2000s, the decline of political competition and recentralization of the Russian state led to incorporation of sub-national authoritarian regimes under federal control and cooptation of local-based actors into the dominant party, United Russia. This paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of sub-national authoritarianism in Russia in light of the experience of local political machines in other countries, ranging from US cities from the 1870s-1930s to Southern Italy from the 1950s-1980s. Unlike the American political machines, which were demolished from below as a by-product of modernization processes, Russia's sub-national authoritarian regimes were integrated from above into the nation-wide authoritarianism. One might expect further stagnation of sub-national authoritarian regimes in Russia until major regime changes will occur on the national level.

The democratization of a national government is only a first step in diffusing democracy throughout a country's territory. Even after a national government is democratized, subnational authoritarian 'enclaves' often continue to deny rights to citizens of local jurisdictions. Gibson offers new theoretical perspectives for the study of democratization in his exploration of this phenomenon. His theory of 'boundary control' captures the conflict pattern between incumbents and oppositions when a national democratic government exists alongside authoritarian provinces (or 'states'). He also reveals how federalism and the territorial organization of countries shape how subnational authoritarian regimes are built and how they unravel. Through a novel comparison of the late nineteenth-century American 'Solid South' with contemporary experiences in Argentina and Mexico, Gibson reveals that the mechanisms of boundary control are reproduced across countries and historical periods. As long as subnational authoritarian governments coexist with national democratic governments, boundary control will be at play.

Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.

Offers a groundbreaking analysis of the distinctive substantive, theoretical and methodological contributions of subnational research in the field of comparative politics.

Today, electoral authoritarianism represents the most common form of political regime in the developing world - and the one we know least about. Filling in the lacuna, this book presents cutting-edge research on the internal dynamics of electoral authoritarian regimes.

Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.

By the end of the 2000s Russia had become an increasingly authoritarian state, which was characterised by the following features: outrageously unfair and fraudulent elections, the existence of weak and impotent political parties, a heavily censored (often self-censored) media, weak rubber-stamping legislatures at the national and sub-national levels, politically subordinated courts, the arbitrary use of the economic powers of the state, and widespread corruption. However, this picture would be incomplete without taking into account the sub-national dimension of these subversive institutions and practices across the regions of the Russian Federation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, sub-national political developments in Russia became highly diversified and the political map of Russia’s regions became multi-faceted. The period of 2000s demonstrated a drive on the part of the Kremlin to re-centralise politics and governance to the demise of newly-emerging democratic institutions at both the national and sub-national levels. Yet, federalism and regionalism remain key elements of the research agenda in Russian politics, and the overall political map of Russia’s regions is far from being monotonic. Rather, it is similar to a complex multi-piece puzzle, which can only be put together through skilful crafting. The 12 chapters in this collection are oriented towards the generation of more theoretically and empirically solid inferences and provide critical evaluations of the multiple deficiencies in Russia’s sub-national authoritarianism, including: principal-agent problems in the relations between the layers of the ’power vertical’, unresolved issues of regime legitimacy that have resulted from manipulative electoral practices, and the inefficient performance of regional and local governments. The volume brings together a team of international experts on Russian regional politics which includes top scholars from Britain, Canada, Russia and the USA.

This book explains how subnational authoritarianism is part of normal democratic politics and strategic interactions between local authoritarians and national democratic leaders"

Democracy does not end at the national level. State and local governments have the potential tobe enclaves of authoritarianism or bastions of democracy. In subnational authoritarian enclaves(SAEs), such as Oaxaca in Mexico, Bahia in Brazil, or the US south after the Civil War, incumbentsmaintain power over time using undemocratic tactics including fraud, institutional manipulation,corruption, and repression. This dissertation focuses on whether the active underminingof democratic values at the subnational level influences citizen support for and satisfaction withdemocracy. This topic has received surprisingly little attention given that voters experience theirpolitical regime first and foremost through the actions of subnational government. I argue thatsubnational authoritarianism has the potential to affect citizen opinions about democracy both directly,via learning and regime juxtaposition, and indirectly via its effect on state economic andpolitical performance. I test these various theoretical mechanisms using a mixed-methods researchdesign. I combine a large-N cross-national analysis with a comparative case study focusing on twocontrasting states in Brazil. For the large-N design, I develop an original cross-national measure ofsubnational authoritarianism for the states of 12 federal democracies from 1980 until today. I combinethis with data from the World Values Survey measuring citizen attitudes about democracy.For the comparative case study, I traveled to the state capitals of Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia,Brazil. I interviewed state party and government officials, journalists and NGO representatives inboth states. The results of this mixed-methods design suggest that subnational authoritarianismcan influence citizen opinions about democracy, but that the theoretical mechanisms connectingthe two are potentially more nuanced than initially proposed.