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This paper will investigate the role of political culture in the democratization process in three post-Soviet States. The paper is an extension of an earlier paper, written and researched over two semesters for graduate research seminars. This study used a most similar case approach involving Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. These three cases are similar in a variety of ways, but vary on the dependent variable, democratization success. The original hypothesis was based on the common argument that a democratic political culture in a state will improve that state’s democratization success The original study’s findings rejected the hypothesis of a positive connection between political culture and democratization, as no clear pattern emerged across the three states or even within them when the indicator questions were analyzed separately. One possible explanation for these findings involves the operationalization of political culture in the original study, as the questions used may have been capturing attitudes toward government policy performance rather than deeply held beliefs about democracy. The proposed paper will employ a different set of questions that arguably capture better the underlying values and beliefs of the population. Following an overview of the original findings, the paper will present an in-depth and critical analysis of the previous survey questions used. The responses of each state will be assessed and analyzed with the intent of finding a pattern within subsets of the original questions. It is not expected that such a pattern will emerge, thus showing the validity issues raised by poor operationalization choices. The paper will then present the results of a new analysis using different survey questions that are arguably more valid indicators of political culture as it is conceptualized in the existing literature. The expectation is that this new study will support the relationship between a democratic political culture and the democratization success of a state. In addition to providing findings important for the ongoing, broader examination of the relationship between political culture and democratization, the study will highlight the importance of question selection in the operationalization of political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters acquire preferences for particular parties and candidates? What causes a citizen or political actor to prefer one policy proposal over another? These questions, of central concern in contemporary political science, are variations on the more general question of Where do preferences come from? that has propelled much theorizing and research in the social sciences (Druckman and Lupia 2000). Within political science, three competing theoretical approaches – rational-choice, contextual/institutional, and cultural – offer different accounts of the formation of preferences. All three approaches have contributed to the accumulated knowledge of preference formation, but there have been few attempts to objectively assess and compare the validity of explanations derived from each approach. This paper will test hypotheses drawn from the three approaches with data gathered by the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, which has conducted surveys of representative samples of the Russian population from 1991 to the present. The political preferences of Russians the ideal data for the study because a natural experiment in preference formation has taken place in their nation over the last decade. With the collapse of communism in 1991, Russian citizens acquired civil liberties and for the first time in their lives they were able to make genuine choices in competitive elections, to openly support or disagree with government policy, and even to consider what type of political order post-communist Russia should have. After ten years of making such choices, most citizens now possess a more or less stable political party preference, if not a firm party identification (Remington 1999). By exploring how individuals acquired their party preferences in the critical Russian case, the paper intends to establish the foundation for an empirically grounded model of political preference formation with considerable explanatory and predictive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causes of government change in Russia’s President-Parliamentary regime (1994-2003) and assesses three theoretical perspectives: 1) The view that the constitutional format of President-Parliamentary regimes causes government instability and conflict. 2) The proposition that Russia’s constitution creates such a powerful presidency that the incumbent can decide government changes unchecked. 3) The view that government change is the result of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which the capability and willingness of actors to use their constitutional powers is shaped by election results, policy and public opinion shocks and government performance. The paper analyses opinion poll, economic and election data, the memoir literature, press reports and current event almanacs. This evidence suggests: 1) That the regime type perspective correctly identifies a tendency toward government instability in Russia’s president-parliamentary regime, but that it can neither account for the mechanisms of government change nor for variation in conflict and co-operation between president and assembly. 2) That the president was influential in many instances, but that major government changes had to be negotiated with the Duma, and that the president was not always able to secure his desired outcomes. 3) That government change in Russia appeared to be best understood as the outcome of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which actors are influenced by election outcomes, public opinion and policy shocks and government performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In investigating protest activity, many scholars have focused on the costs and benefits of participation. In this paper, I am concerned with the characteristics of the individual that might enhance his/her probability of participating in protest activity. The literature on protest and collective action has pointed to interpersonal trust as an important factor influencing an individual?s propensity for protest activity. Theoretically, the influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity could be positive or negative: interpersonal trust can serve as a psychological signal to individuals that others will show up thereby enhancing the probability of successful collective action; or interpersonal trust can serve as a signal that others will participate and the individual can stay home without endangering the provision of the public good. Not only do I consider the specific influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity, but I also examine the potential influence of trust in government, generalized trust, and ethnic trust on protest behavior. In this paper, I test the various hypotheses about the effect of trust on an individual?s decision to engage in protest activity using data collected in the Russian republic of Sakha. Given the location of the study, I examine the varying levels of participation and trust of the two main ethnic groups?the Russians and the Sakha. In this paper, I find that there are important differences between the two groups in the factors that influence protest activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains why some opposition groups can inspire millions to stand in the cold for days while others generate little popular attention? This issue is not sufficiently understood by scholars of social movements and opposition processes, who tend to focus more on underlying and longer term conditions that promote or inhibit action and less on the moment when protests by small numbers of activists expand into mass popular demonstrations. Understanding this moment may help us see why "electoral revolutions" occurred in some former communist countries but not others. My claim in this paper is that cultural context, particularly the limits and opportunities provided by social understandings of nationalism and remembered history, greatly affects whether activists can convince large numbers of people to act together. I defend this claim by analyzing original interviews with youth activists in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. My paper shows that the structure of opportunity that activists face includes dominant cultural values and popular expectations that may constrain the story activists hope to tell. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction and the further abolition of the direct gubernatorial elections in Russia made it possible to study the governors' ability to stand up for their offices in different institutional designs. This paper gives an overview of the governors' ability to stay in office in 1991-2008 and shows their relations with the parties of power. The party of power is viewed as the federal center policy implementation tool that can co-opt the governors into the ruling elite. The paper argues that the federal center's aspiration to use the governors' resources of power in the building of the new "vertical of power" was the main factor that enabled the majority of the directly elected governors to stay in their offices after 2005. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an Ethnic Group Identity Index that seeks to create a qualitative measure of ethnic group identity. After creating the index, the paper will use a case study of Chechnya to measure their ethnic group identity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research demonstrates that the structural conflict between the propertied and the poor in non-communist authoritarian states affects the likelihood, timing, and outcome of democratization. In highly unequal societies, democratization has a strongly redistributive effect.The effect of transition in postcommunist democracies was quite different. Given the absence of private property in most means of production, the deliberate policies of wage compression, the widespread availability of income-support mechanisms, and the importance of collective consumption funds in such social goods and services as housing, healthcare, education, transportation, cultural goods and recreation, both income and consumption differentials were narrow compared with democratic capitalist societies at similar development levels. The transition, therefore, brought substantial increases in aggregate income inequality to the post-communist countries, with some post-communist countries reaching levels higher than those of some West European countries.Much political economy literature suggests that democratization is expected to make government more responsive to wider segments of society, more inclined to supply universal collective goods and services such as security of person and property, health care, education, and infra-structure, as well as to provide some minimum level of social insurance against the hazards of catastrophic income loss. These public goods and services should foster productive behavior on the part of economic agents, and thus growth, as well as the mitigation of extremes of poverty and inequality.However, collusion in rent-extraction by post-transition elites might be consistent with high rates of economic growth under some circumstances. If the elites take advantage of the new institutional environment of a post-communist state and capture control over productive assets for themselves, they might well use them to increase their own incomes, yielding rapid aggregate growth the benefits of which are concentrated in a narrow elite. The institutional advantages of democratization and property rights might be restricted to those holding monopolies over property, and not broadly shared. Their policies would lead to higher growth rates after an initial period of disorganization was overcome. But the benefits of the growth would be distributed unequally. An oligarchic democracy would complement an oligarchic form of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of the dual political and economic transition on income inequality trends, taking Russia's subnational regions (the subjects of the federation) as the units of observation. Noting that the regions differed widely both in their starting conditions and in the increase in income growth and differentiation as a consequence of the transition, it seeks to identify the political mechanisms that explain variation in income and inequality growth following the transition. Using both direct and instrumental measures of democracy by region, the paper finds evidence consistent with the "oligarchic democracy" model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the important linkages between institutional choice and the issue dimensionality in three emergent democratic legislatures. We hypothesize that the adoption of party-centered versus candidate-centered electoral institutions had significant implications for the structure of the roll call behavior of legislators. We expect the roll call voting of legislators selected by party-centered systems to exhibit a lower dimensionality and greater structure than for legislators selected in candidate-centered systems. Using Lewis and Poole's (2004) W-NOMINATE procedure with bootstrapped standard errors, we compare the number of issue dimensions, the aggregate proportional reduction in error (APRE), and the percentage of variance explained by the 1st W-NOMINATE dimension across different electoral systems in the U. S. House of Representatives, the Ukranian Rada, and the Russian Duma. We found that the choice of electoral institutions has notable influences on the nature of roll call behavior, but that country-specific political context appeared to have important behavior implications as well.∗ Paper ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the centralization processes in Mexico and Russia. In this paper, the author traces and compares the development of the centralization processes that occurred in Russia from 2000-present and in Mexico from the revolution of 1910 to the eventual reversal of the country's tightly centralized system in the 1990s. The study demonstrates how the structure and strength of parties of power resulted in a shift in the balance of power between the center and regions and supports Riker's contention that federal institutions oftentimes take a back seat to other political factors in determining the actual distribution of power and resources within a federal polity.

This paper analyzes transnational relations with a special focus on the Russia. The main concern here is the reform movement in the Russian government at a state level with regard to the trade policy in order to access the World Trade Organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing American and Russian responses to school targeted terrorism this paper analyzes comparative preparedness policies and dissemination techniques practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper statistically tests propositions that the Russian Constitutional Court favors some levels of government over others in making decisions on federalist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the question of how organized crime and corruption have influenced the Chechen conflict in post-Soviet Russia. It is hypothesized that organized crime and corruption act to sustain and prolong the conflict. Specifically, crime and corruption act to magnify underlying dynamics and structures that effect protracted social conflicts. The extent to which this occurs can be gauged by using the taxonomy established by Richani (1999) to conceptualize a political economy condition within internal conflict situations or ?war-system?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments surrounding the media in post-Soviet countries highlight a nagging issue facing theorists and proponents of civil society and social capital. On the one hand, analysts argue that a strong civil society and ample supplies of social capital provide the free flows of information and trust necessary to both stimulate economic development and promote good governance. On the other hand, little guidance exists as to how these institutions develop; particularly in countries evolving from socialist regimes where former state structures essentially crowded out the so-called third sector. Analysts like Robert Putnam point to the existence of virtuous circles, a reciprocating and mutually reinforcing effect between civil society and economic development – but few analysts have indicated how these circular relationships are first set in motion. If students of democratic and market transitions are to understand how civil society develops in relation to the economy and state, they must identify the points of origins of key, tangible, social institutions like a free media. In this paper, the author brings a wealth of cases to the examination of this issue by examining the relationship between media freedom and a set of demographic, economic and political variables drawn from each of the 88 (minus the Chechen Republic) regions of the Russian Federation. Given the marked variation on key indicators across Russia’s regions, a subnational analysis of this issue allows one to isolate the socioeconomic, demographic and political variables of interest while controlling for a host of cultural factors which might otherwise hinder a cross-national study. Furthermore, the study benefits from a rather sophisticated media freedom measure developed by the organization "Obshchestvennaia Ekspertiza" (Social Expertise) which draws upon a complex set of measures related to information access and the production and distribution of media products for all of Russia’s federal subunits. The author concludes that, while economic diversification and development are key prerequisites for a free media, other factors, like a more liberal political culture and the nature of Russia’s asymmetrical federal structures, have a small role to play. The results indicate that levels of media freedom were mostly determined by economic development and the diversification of local economic structures during the 1990s. Nonetheless, the models also hint at some role for a latent liberal political culture existing in some regions as well as a measure signifying whether or not the region is an "ethnic" republic. Together these outcomes indicate that, while economic development appears to be a necessary prior condition for the development of a strong Post-Soviet media, certain regions appear to exhibit a preexisting liberal political culture that can at least enhance the development of regional media freedom. Furthermore, the significance of the ethnic republic measure supports the assertions of other authors (Kahn 2003) that the special status of these units has promoted the growth of regional authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what role the Second Russian Constitutional Court has played in resolving center-regional conflicts from 1995-2007. Previous work indicated favoritism by the Court of central government and individual actors over regional actors in center-regional conflicts, but this was a limited by the number of years of cases available. This study expands the period of cases used and now covers most of the Putin era and its “verticalization” of the federal system. The analysis for this study includes basic statistics on number of cases brought before the Court and by what actors as well as binomial and ordinal regressions to test effects of time on the Court’s possible favoritism. In a change from previous work, additional analysis is included to determine the actual probability of the Court favoring particular actors over others in center-regional conflicts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on transition and democratization was for long dominated by internal explanatory factors such as economic performance, civil society, institutions, etc. Only recently have external actors' democratizing efforts - like those of the US and the EU - been incorporated. But the perspective remains too narrow, since only 'positive' external actors are considered, while possible 'negative' actors are left aside. This paper attempts to rectify the imbalance by analyzing a 'negative' case - Russia. First, an analytical framework that can be used to analyze both positive and negative actors' actions and effects is introduced. Then, the framework's applicability is illustrated by analyzing Russia's influence in the 'Near Abroad'. The analysis shows how Russia, primarily, weakens democratic perspectives in the countries of the post-Soviet area. Finally, on the basis of this analysis I discuss the implications that this 'negative' influence has for the success of the EU's Neighborhood Policy. It is argued that although Russia is a major hindrance to the West's democratizing efforts in the short run, the power-politics approach is undermining its influence capacity in the longer run. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent distributional theories of democracy postulate that structural conflict between rich and poor affects the likelihood, timing and outcome of democratization. Regime transitions in postcommunist states also featured distributional conflict, with wide differences in economic growth and income distribution resulting from the interaction of policy choices, regime characteristics, and inherited legacies of material and human assets. Through analysis of Russia’s regions, this paper examines the effect of the dual political and economic transition on incomes and income distribution. It finds that, even accounting for the inherited conditions, regions with more open political regimes have enjoyed greater economic growth and a faster reduction in poverty; however, at every level of income, more democratic regions also have higher levels of income inequality. The results are consistent with the theoretical conjectures in recent distributive accounts of democracy that in transitions where middle-income strata are allied with the rich, a partial version of democracy results, where policy-makers are accountable not to the median citizen, but to a restricted set of political and economic elites. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2007, former Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume patrols of its long-range bomber fleet into international air space. The most symbolic of these flights occurred in September 2008 when a Tu-160 transited the Atlantic Ocean to Venezuela. The Tu-95/Bear-H and Tu-160/Blackjack bombers are a part of Russia-s nuclear triad and are capable of carrying the nuclear armed AS-15/Kent air launched cruise missile. Russian Air Force representatives claim the bombers are not armed and are simply conducting exercises and patrols with no aggressive intent. However, Russia-s leadership has stated publicly that it is willing to use nuclear weapons if provoked and has announced that it will aim its nuclear weapons at countries like Poland and the Czech Republic for harboring components of the US ballistic missile shield. Current President Dmitry Medvedev has also announced plans to increase funding to Russian strategic weapon platforms. These indicators have led to widespread concern over a return to Cold War hostilities between the United States and Russia. In this paper I intend to examine the role that these bomber patrols play in Russian foreign policy objectives and power projection aspirations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borderline democracies are political systems in transition, which have made tremendous progress in their democratic development, experienced some reversals on the way, and have arrived at an important historical juncture that will determine the future path of democratization. A borderline stage of democracy means that a democratic regime is still fragile and vacillating. To maintain a steady democratic advancement, such regimes may benefit from political science theories and the practices of other democratic regimes. This paper builds upon the relevant Western literature on democracy and applies it to the case of Russia. Russia represents a nascent democracy with unique cultural attributes and an adequate legislature and democratic institutions (the constitution, elections, and the constituency base). These institutions and written laws, however, lack full practical implementation and need further strengthening by grassroots movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:We argue that there is a similar situation between today Russia and Weimar Germany because similar factors lead from a defective electoral democracy to an electoral autocracy. We demonstrate that a structural explation with socio-economic factors is not appropriate to explain democratic breakdown in the "crucial cases" of Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia. We show that 1. a considerable lack of democrats on the elite level as well as on the population level and 2. an ill-defined form of government, that allows the president to rule without the parliament in combination with an nondemocratic actor which gets elected for president are sufficient reasons for a country to experience an authoriarian regression. In the second and third part of the paper we take a look on the question, when an electoral semiautocracy is in danger to get a fascist ideocracy. In the second part we show that there is fertile ground for fascism in Russia today. We demonstrate that as in Weimar Germany we can find in today Russia strong fascist actors and a widespread nationalism among the population. But in the third part we we will show, that all in all, ironically, in current Russia, in distinction to Germany 1. a manipulated party system and a underdeveloped third sector, 2. a strong semiautocratic president make it difficult for the country to become a liberal democracy, but make it also improbable that the Russian regime will transgress into a fascist autocracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original survey data from national elections in Russia in 2000 and 2004 to explore the sources of electoral support for Putin, an example of a strong hybrid regime leader. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a difference-in-difference estimation design and matched sampling to compare the impact of sweep operations by Russian soldiers and Chechen militia on levels of subsequent insurgent violence in Chechnya. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the political effects of climate change through a comparative-historical analysis of three very different communities: coastal Alaska, the Chinese-Russian border, and post-Katrina New Orleans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical perspective on the Kremlin’s re-centralization of power and its attempts to re-draw regional borders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a game theoretic model to explain why Kazakhstan pursues a multi-vector foreign policy. In the game, Kazakhstan's best strategy is to challenge Russia's demand given a higher probability to find other partners to cooperate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I offer a historical account for the geography of homicide mortality in post-Soviet Russia. Russia's extraordinarily high national homicide rates are commonly attributed to the disorganization of state institutions and socio-economic shocks that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. I demonstrate that the striking spatial differences with regard to homicide mortality across Russia's regions cannot be explained by the shock of transition. Instead, I argue that the roots of this spatial differentiation are to be found in the patterns of Soviet planning and social engineering. Using an original panel dataset of regional homicide mortality and its correlates, I demonstrate that the geography of post-Soviet homicide mortality is partly explained by the geography of coercive demographic modernization by Soviet planners. Territorial populations whose characteristics were most radically transformed during the Soviet era are overwhelmingly the same populations that experienced the most severe failure of public order after communism. I use a two-stage procedure for estimating the effects of time-invariant factors on a time-variable dependent variable, to demonstrate that Soviet-era demographic transformations are significantly and positively related to regional homicide rates: in particular, I show that the speed and magnitude of (1) urban growth and (2) modernization of familial organization help account for the residual unit heterogeneity unexplained by existing hypotheses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper casts the practices of corruption as an information problem. It seeks to explain the mechanism of distribution of public procurement contracts, and is conceived as a comparative case study of the municipal elites in Italy and in Russia. The underlying assumption of the argument is that in countries, where the interaction between the municipalities and the local businesses is not well institutionalized, public servants have some leverage to deviate from the formal rules. The paper hypothesizes that municipal officials make decisions whether to embark on illegal practices, based on their perception of the likelihood that they will be punished for the corrupt acts. They form this perception on the basis of the information they receive from three main sources- the media, the record of successful court litigations against corrupt officials, and informal gatherings. The paper operationalizes each of these three factors of the political and social environment and traces their effect on the perception of the municipal elites. Media bias is measured through the number of newspaper quotes regarding corruption interacted with the specific ownership of this newspaper. Information regarding possible punishment from the courts is measured as a percentage of successful litigation over persecution cases. The crux of the paper examines how informal associations can serve as major channels for conveying information about the general tolerance for corruption. It could be conceived as a novel extension of the studies of associations and their ramifications on the decision making process of political elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how military strategy shapes the prospects for negotiated settlement of inter-state disputes during crises. According to offense-defense theorists, diplomacy is likely to fail when states adopt offensive strategies. An offensive strategy, they argue, creates a strong incentive for preemptive attack and thus make less time available for negotiation. A defensive strategy imposes no such time pressure on diplomatic process. In contrast, I propose a new theory that focuses on whether a military strategy is maneuver or attrition-centered. When a state has what I call a maneuver strategy, I argue, crisis bargaining will bear no fruit for two reasons. First, the cost-effective strategy will imbue its owner with confidence in military victory and thus lead it to ask for large concessions. Second, the deceptiveness of the maneuver strategy hinders an accurate assessment of military capabilities and therefore prevents antagonists from finding a mutually satisfactory bargain. Such obstacles to diplomacy are not present when states have attrition strategies. This paper tests theses theories through a comparative-historical analysis. I first examine how the maneuver-oriented German Schlieffen Plan led to a diplomatic failure during the crisis of July 1914. I then investigate how Russia’s attrition strategy contributed to peaceful settlements with Germany during the 1870s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State-sponsored irredentism – the effort by a government to recover territory containing ethnic kin in a nearby state – has generated some of the most significant crises and problems of the post-Cold War international system. Irredentism has started war in some places (Armenia-Azerbaijan), exacerbated war in others (Bosnia, Croatia), and produced serious threats to wider regional systems that have brought significant international response (Kosovo). At the same time, some states that have had the opportunity to pursue irredentism (Hungary, Romania, Russia) have chosen not to do so. It is vitally important that we be able to distinguish between these kinds of cases, so that we can better understand where aggressive irredentism is or is not likely to occur in the future. As important to understanding the attention-getting cases of aggressive irredentism (Serbia, for example) is study of cases where the opportunity for irredentism exists, but it does not occur. Why do some state leaders, faced with the possibility of pursuing aggressively irrendentist policies towards ethnic kin nearby, decline to do so? This paper will focus on Russia as a case of a dog that didn’t bark, both examining the opportunities that post-Soviet Russian governments have had and reasons, both international and domestic, for why those governments have eschewed those opportunities. In particular, the paper will address whether the lack of irredentism in the Russian case can be attributed to economic conditions, domestic political dynamics, or international political pressures (or some combination of these factors). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of interest intermediation in advanced industrial democracies have focused on a range of different ways in which organized labor is integrated into politics through such institutions as tripartite bargaining and labor based political parties. This paper shows how attempts to imitate such institutions in the post-Communist lead to unexpected outcomes in which unions are used as political resources by regional political elites both in their bargaining with national leaderships and in the competition for power at the regional level. The collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe brought with it a host of new representative institutions with the avowed purpose of creating democracy. Many of the institutions, such as competitive elections, and many organizations, including most political parties, were truly new and have transformed the way politics and society operate throughout the region. Scholars, however, have noted that these new institutions were introduced not into a context of tabula rasa, but rather into a world already replete with institutions that were in varying stages of atrophy, decline, reform or revolutionary change. As a result, relationships between actors and their political and institutional connections with important social groups were not made entirely anew by the institutionalization of competitive elections and the writing of new constitutions. Instead the institutional apparatus of the old regime was often refracted through the lens of transition, creating new structures that affect patterns of mobilization and interest representation in the new democracies. This process of refraction, I argue, has had important consequences for the nature and quality of democracy in the post-Communist world. To date scholars have spent some time analyzing how previously existing institutions have affected subsequent developments, particularly in the economy. There has also been some work on the way in which former Communist political parties have either transformed themselves or not. However, most of the work remains to be done if we are to understand the implications of institutional legacies and changes for the way in which different interests are aggregated and represented in the post-Communist states. In this paper I look at how one important institution has evolved through the transition, and has come to assume a rather surprising role in the new politics. Taking the example of Russia, I show how labor unions have been transformed into tools for coordinating political strategies among elite actors, rather than developing into representative organizations for workers. A curious institutional arrangement combining some of the features of Leninist “transmission belt” unions with elements of West European style social democracy has emerged. This transformation of labor unions into political machines for regional executives is one of the reasons that predictions of organized labor opposition to economic reform and expectations of a social explosion have gone unfulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the beginning stages of the twenty-first century, China, Russia and India are all transforming their economies and, to some extent, their political systems to play an active political role in this globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comparative analysis of media-state relations in Russia and Ukraine, focusing on the systematic coercion of the press in both countries. The author begins by surveying the coercive tactics--ranging from bureaucratic roadblocks to physical violence--that the Russian and Ukrainian states have used to deter critical voices in the media since the late 1990s, when press freedom began a steady decline in both countries. Based on the data, a typology of media coercion was developed and an informal model to explain why both states have employed many of the same methods and have followed a similar pattern of coercion escalation.

This article explains how the sources of party finance affect the structure of individual political parties and the political system as a whole and the reason for the non-emergence of mass political parties in Russia. Wealth and income inequality and significant discretionary authority of the state over business affairs has led to weakness and a multiplicity of parties in Russia.

We view party strategy as fitting the compound imperatives of the entire "political business cycle"?from one election to the next?and focus on the legislative stage of that cycle. Our empirical cases are Russia and Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past several decades, significant attention has been paid to “getting the institutions right” in rapidly changing polities and economies. Concomitantly, a renewed interest in federalism and the design of federal institutions has spawned a search for factors favorable for the development of stable federalism. This study addresses this very important issue of institutional choice by investigating the origins of the post-communist Russian federation. Russia serves as an excellent case for building theory because it exposes key problems with already existing definitions, typologies, and theories concerning the origins of federations. Moreover, with a comparative eye to other cases undergoing simultaneous democratization and federalization, namely Brazil, South Africa, and Spain, the critical juncture framework developed to explain the origins of such federations goes beyond Russia and makes a modest claim to greater generalizability. Key to understanding the simultaneous processes of democratization and federalization are liberalizers’ decisions to broaden the base of the authoritarian regime and the types of constituencies with which they choose to ally themselves. Activating subnational elites with already existing institutionalized power bases as allies of the liberalizing project, while conducive to extrication from the authoritarian regime, produce significant integration challenges for the new federal regime. Among these are the continuation of subnational clientelistic patterns, fragmentation of central political authority, and increases in subnational leaders’ bargaining leverage vis-à-vis federal authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study critically evaluates different conceptual approaches to the operationalization of political institutionalization which have been offered in the literature on the subject. The author develops a detailed theoretical framework and operational indicators which help to measure the degree of institutionalization of a party system in a democratic country. The analysis focuses on two broad dimensions of political institutionalization, autonomy and stability, and proposes several feasible and precise indicators which allow the criteria of institutionalization to be operationalized. On the basis of this conceptual framework, the study measures levels of political institutionalization of the party systems in the five post-Soviet transitional countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1999 Russian national election, 48 percent of winners had been elected as independents. However, less than three percent of all independent victors that same year were women. Over the last decade, the percent of independent candidates who have gained seats has increased, while the percent of women winning as independents has decreased. The fact that most of the deputies in the Russian Duma are independents is no surprise given Russia’s weak party system. What is surprising is that women independent candidates do not win at the same rate that men independent candidates win. Why do men do well when they run as independent candidates and women do not? We argue that women fail to win as independents because they lack party affiliation. We suggest that the effects of party label on electoral success may be gender specific. Therefore, running as an independent will hurt a woman’s chances of winning, whereas men running as independents may actually gain more seats. We suggest that women lack other forms of electoral resources that are more readily available to men. They must therefore rely more heavily on the resources that are available to them through party affiliation. We examine the affects of party affiliation for both men and women candidates in the national elections for the Russian Duma and the Ukrainian Rada since their adoption of mixed electoral systems. Our findings suggest that party label is an important electoral resource for women running in Russian and Ukrainian national elections and that the affects of party affiliation are different for men and women candidates. This finding may aid us in explaining why the number of women in the Russian Duma has been decreasing since the first election under the new electoral system. Russian and Ukranian women who run as independents may be giving up an invaluable resource which, for them, may mean the difference between winning and losing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has engaged in a separatist movement from Russia. Throughout the 1990s, Chechnya regarded their separatist movement as a relatively successful independence revolution due to their victory in the Chechen War of 1994-1996. However, since the war on terrorism began, the United States and Russia have denounced Chechnya as a terrorist state. Russian President Vladimir Putin has implemented military policies towards the Chechen separatist movement that has led to the current Russian occupation of Chechnya in the second Chechen War. Due to the inability of Chechen Guerilla soldiers to defeat the occupying Russians, Chechnya has relied on terrorist acts as a last military resort for Chechen independence. Through a case study analysis of the second Chechen War, my research suggests that a state evolves into a terrorist state only after military dominance by an occupying enemy in which the only defense left is terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-member electoral systems embrace two distinct views of representation by electing some legislators in single-member district elections and others in a proportional representation in election. This can potentially create a “mandate divide” in legislatures, since single-member district legislators have an incentive to embrace parochial issues and proportional representation legislators have an incentive to center on national issues. Previous studies of this question have only found limited evidence of its existence. I argue that the level of party system institutionalization will fundamentally determine whether a mandate divide will exist in a mixed-member legislature. Using roll-call voting data from three post-communist legislatures, the Hungarian National Assembly, the Russian State Duma, and the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, I analyze patterns of party discipline in each legislature to search for the existence of a mandate divide. The empirical results show that a mandate divide only existed in the legislature with the most weakly institutionalized party system, the Russian State Duma. This leads to the conclusion that the level of party system institutionalization will affect the probability of a mandate divide appearing in a mixed-member legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of panel data from Brazil, Mexico, and Russia suggests that presidential campaigns have ambiguous effects on inequalities in mass-level political knowledge. In all three campaigns, the gap in political knowledge between individuals with fewer socioeconomic resources and those with more resources stayed the same or widened. At the same time, less affluent, less educated citizens who paid a great deal of attention to the campaign learned more than equally attentive high-status citizens. These findings suggest that electoral campaigns have the potential to mitigate the knowledge gap, even if they fail to do so in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the abilities of Russia as a swing producer in the Gas Exporting Countries Forum and compare it with the case of Saudi Arabia in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Russia has ambitions to be powerful again in international relations, on the basis of its resource economy. Its ambitions exceed economic means, and are expanding toward political use of its resources. However, in order for Russia to exercise lasting influences with the resource economic power, it will have to first achieve the capabilities as a swing producer, then maintain them. The case of Russia in gas industry and the proposed GECF will be considered. This will be compared with the case of Saudi Arabia in the OPEC, with the political, economic, and ideological decisions it had to make. Thus, this paper will argue that Russia does not have the capabilities to exercise influences as it seems to assume, and its power on other countries will be short-lived if it is mainly based on resource economy only, because it is not capable of being a swing producer in the energy industry. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the usage of a series of concepts emerged in the Russian mass media since late 1990s that are related to civilized market: "civilized economy", "civilized redistribution", "conscientious owner", "bogus bankruptcy" and “orchestrated bankruptcy” etc. The paper interprets the concrete, multiple layers of meanings of these concepts in light of the classical debate about the relation between market and morality. It also analyzes the intensity of usage of these concepts across different economic and social spheres. It argues that the unique social and economic experiences of post-communist Russia shape the interpretations and usage of these concepts, which deviate from what is usually implied in the classical discussion of moral order of capitalism. In particular, the gap between the early day expectation of how a market economy should function and the real performance of the market in Russia lays the foundation for the creation and popularity of such new vocabulary in the Russian media. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate about the effects of political institutions on economic performance (Persson and Tabellini 2003) and the literature on democratic consolidation in federal states (Gibson 2004, 2005, Eisenstadt, and J. Hindley 1999) by examining why and when subnational governments implement policies that facilitate the entry and growth of new firms. Although Jackson (2005) demonstrated that de novo firms served as engines of democratic consolidation in post-Soviet economies, the mechanisms by which political institutions affect the formation of new firms have not been understood yet because scholars focused on financial and legal constraints or special interest influence (McDermott 2003, Estrin et al. 2007, Slinko et al. 2004). This paper uses data for Russian regions and a natural experiment design to assess a relative importance of intergovernmental competition for mobile capital vis-à-vis electoral systems on cross-regional variation in the number and growth of small firms. Two hypotheses are tested: 1) if the introduction of a mixed-electoral system in the regions increased the formation of small firms; 2) if the reduction of taxing powers of the regional governments slowed this process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian Foreign Policy changed critically after 2003. In particular, her attitude toward some of the former soviet republics turned more coercive than others. According to the previous studies, Russia tried to keep her ascendant position in that region by emphasizing bilateral security and economic cooperation. Accordingly, energy was arguably one of the most important factors regardless of the locality. In this paper, I concur that Russia’s primary goal lies in expanding spheres of influence and energy plays a pivotal role, both politically and economically. Ever since Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was most concerned that the new nations’ unstable situation and enlargement of US influence could have a debilitating impact on her national stability. However, I argue that the struggle for control of power in the former Soviet region between Russia and US precipitates their respective obsession with energy in the region. By proposing that the nature of Russo-US relationship in the concerned former Soviet republic better accounts for recent conflicts between Russia and some of former Soviet region countries-and its absence in others, this paper explores what differentiates the Russian policy toward the former Soviet republics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper analyzes the trends in Russian foreign policy towards Trasndniestria conflict resolution. Since the formation of Transdniestrian Moldovan Republic ( PMR) in early 1990th Russia has supported this de facto state on the territory of Moldova by official and unofficial means as well as other unrecognized states on the post-Soviet space and claimed for their world recognition. It seems that after Kosovo precedent and the war in South Ossetia Russian support of PMR would strengthen but after given official recognition to the Abkhazia and Ossetia Russia did not deliver any statement on this issue regarding Transdnistria. At the same time Russia continues to be a main player in conflict resolution in Moldova and sends diverse signals to the both sides of conflict, so, its policy towards region has started to be more ambivalent then the previous one. The aim of the paper is to reveal the reasons for changes in attitudes to the situation and to look what kind of concerns Russia and other involved actors have and what goals they pursue in attempts to resolve this conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that former Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to return Russia to its former status as a 'great power' on the world stage. To effect the kinds of changes that would allow him more control over the government and the economy in order to do this, Putin installed a significant number of former KGB officers in his governmentâ€"a situation that has not changed since Dmitry Medvedev assumed the presidency. Using a transitional justice framework, I will contrast this with the presumed effects of lustration, a mechanism often used to ensure that a regime does not return to an authoritarian style of rule. Putin’s regime has also attempted to rewrite the history of the Soviet Union, with substantial glossing over or minimizing of inconvenient facts such as mass repression, arrests, psychiatric detention, and deportations that occurred during the Soviet period. This paper will contrast this with the transitional justice literature on historical accuracy and truth. Finally, I will contrast the nationalistic glorification of the Soviet period as the heyday of Russian power with the pluralism advocated by the transitional justice framework. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective regulatory regimes are essential in providing a stable and secure environment for market players. This paper reexamines the issue of regulation/deregulation in the light of deregulatory and new regulatory initiatives in post-communist Eastern Europe. To build an integrated theory of post-communist regulation, I develop a game-theoretical model of state-industry interaction over the choice of regulatory regime that accounts for differential combinations of preferences for regulation on the part of the state, regulatory agencies, and the industry. The proposed model specifies under what conditions industry actors strive for more, rather than fewer, regulations and in what circumstances the state favors regulatory withdrawal. The model accounts for institutional features of emerging markets that are not captured by the existing theories of regulation. The paper discusses evidence from Russia and Ukraine drawing attention to the role of bureaucratic graft, accountability, and centralization in shaping industry's demands for deregulation or more regulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing the rise of dominant parties in non-democracies as a commitment problem between state leaders and other elites. The paper draws on examples and evidence from Russia under Vladimir Putin to illustrate its points. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that federal political polarization is the main determinant of the changes in federal-regional relations in post-Soviet Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]