Klychkov i Pustota: Post-Soviet Bureaucrats and the Production of Institutional Facades (original) (raw)
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American Political Science Review, 2002
Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The “building materials” out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.
This book explores the path of Ukraine’s political regime transformations in a period from the independence to the Revolution of Dignity. It aims to assess the impact of informal institutions, especially clientelism, nepotism and informal agreements on the behavior of political actors. The research argues that informal institutions have determined the behavior of elites – from the «cartel pact» at the beginning of Ukraine’s independence, to playing not by the rules, as many expected, but with rules and systematic violation of the rule of law, which eventually led to the inefficient institutional equilibrium – institutional trap. Undermodernized state and the hybrid type of political regime signify the systemic institutional trap. Five factors are taken into account: the operational code of elites’ political culture, the practice of informal agreements, devolution of constitutionalism, structural constraints and the high uncertainty. All these factors shape the behavior of the major political players. Combining them into a dynamic model allowed tracing the process of «hybridization» of Ukraine’s regime, or the country’s slide into the trap of hybridity.
Social contracts and authoritarian projects in post-Soviet space: The use of administrative resource
Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2010
Drawing on evidence from Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, this article analyses the use of a tool of political coercion known in the post-communist world as adminresurs, or administrative resource. Administrative resource is characterized by the pre-election capture of bureaucratic hierarchies by an incumbent regime in order to secure electoral success at the margins. In contrast to other forms of political corruption, administrative resource fundamentally rewrites existing social contracts. It redefines access to settled entitlementsdpublic infrastructure, social services, and labor compensationdas rewards for political support. It is thus explicitly negative for publics, who stand to lose access to existing entitlements if they do not support incumbents. The geography of its success in post-communist states suggests that this tool of authoritarian capacity building could be deployed anywhere two conditions are present: where there are economically vulnerable populations, and where economic and political spheres of life overlap.
Institutions, business and the state in Russia
Institutions, business and the state in Russia, 2003
THIS ARTICLE LOOKS AT LINKS between firms’ behaviour and the institutional set-up in Russia. It seeks to achieve two objectives. The first is to demonstrate that an institutional approach may achieve what the neoclassical approach has largely failed to accomplish, i.e. explain the factors that forced a great number of firms in Russia to delay restructuring and other anticipated responses following privatisation and price liberalisation. The second objective is to show that the intentional weakening of the economic and administrative role of the state in the early stages of reforms has deepened the institutional crisis and increased the economic and social cost of transition. There is growing consensus that one of the main causes of the shortage of market-type response is the frailty of market-based incentives. The new institutional economics proposes to view the inadequacies of the domestic system of institutions (which may be defined as the rules of the game in the society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactions) as a factor that does not allow market incentives to reveal their strength. In fact, one of the reasons for some of the idiosyncratic practices of Russian companies is the fear that under present conditions market-type behaviour may bring losses rather than rewards. Accordingly, this article argues that the central issue of the current stage of reforms is to secure a move from an interim institutional system that emerged spontaneously in the early 1990s to an up-to-date system that can help consolidate the achievements of reforms and bring Russian capitalism into the modern age. Currently institutions in Russia maintain features that came into being as a reaction to some very specific challenges of post-communist reconstruction. As a result the evidence that the current institutional environment has ceased to help the progress of the Russian economy should not come as a surprise. As this article will demonstrate, the present institutional arrangements in Russia reflect the drawbacks and weaknesses associated with a period of systemic change, such as domination of short-term interests, poor access to business information, lack of trust, collapse of traditional business ties, parallel existence of incompatible business cultures etc. These features made inevitable the introduction of makeshift solutions, in particular because the state as an active force in creating an institutional set-up had been weakened and was reticent during this period. However, the article aims to demonstrate that these arrangements have reached the limits of their efficiency and have become a barrier to further development as they fail to institutionalise economic conflict and provide a solid and cost-effective foundation for market transactions. The institutional framework in Russia has to be modernised and this leads to the difficult question of how this should be done. It is only natural to look at the dichotomy of evolution and deliberate action. Can economic growth on its own change institutional set-up? What should be the force behind institutional reforms? As a contribution to the transition debate this article will specifically address the issue of whether and to what degree the state may be trusted with this task in Russia.
In the presented paper oligarchy is seen not as a transitional form of post-communist rule, a particular post-Soviet road from socialism to capitalism, from plan to market, and from autocracy to democracy but as a substantially different model of social organization and power, as a particular model of societal modernization. This system has its own resources, mechanisms of reproduction, and powerful social forces of support at both the level of formal institutions and informal everyday practices. First, I delineate two theoretical approaches – institutional theory, namely its path dependency version, and rational choice theory – combining them to achieve more adequate framework of analysis of the phenomenon at hand. Second, the essence of the oligarchic model is considered with a particular focus on how it is related to democracy and modernization processes. Third, the paper elucidates the dynamics of oligarchy as well as factors that conditioned its emergence and further reinforcement, emphasizing primarily the antecedent conditions. The issue of how the model of transformation employed by ruling classes predetermined the path of Ukrainian society to oligarchy is somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion and referred to only sketchily.
The chapter analyses the effects of rent dependence and Putin’s rent redistribution system on small and medium-sized enterprises, ‘the new private sector’ in the Russian economy. The Worldwide Governance Indicators are used to analyse the institutions supporting the market economy and it is argued that when a dominant part of the economy is ruled by the management of oil rents to secure the power of the regime, the role of market-oriented institutions becomes limited. The chapter also analyses the effects of the present restrictions on voice and civil society for institutional development and concludes that there is little hope for ‘reform from below’ of the system.
Institutional genesis of kleptocratic economy and its formation in Ukraine
Naukovyi Visnyk Natsionalnoho Hirnychoho Universytetu, 2020
Purpose. To analyze the kleptocratic economy as an institutional arrangement that is focused on the key function of generating sources of income for the ruling pseudo-elite by introducing corrupt non-market transaction costs for firms and households, which are based on administrative, bureaucratic and political violence. Methodology. In the proposed scientific research, we distinguish three types of research methods: firstly, inherent in cognition as a whole (general logical) methods such as analysis, synthesis, abstraction, generalization, induction, deduction, analogy; secondly, general scientific, primarily empirical, research methods, namely observation, description, measurement; thirdly, the theoretical methods of cognition used by the economic science, in particular: idealization, formalization; the axiomatic method for constructing theoretical knowledge; a hypothetical-deductive method for constructing and developing theoretical knowledge. Findings. The socio-economic structu...