Russia's Regions and Comparative Subnational Politics

William M. Reisinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135122461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Subnational political units are growing in influence in national and international affairs, drawing increasing scholarly attention to politics beyond national capitals. In this book, leading Russian and Western political scientists contribute to debates in comparative politics by examining Russia's subnational politics.

Beginning with a chapter that reviews major debates in theory and method, this book continues to examine Russia's 83 regions, exploring a wide range of topics including the nature and stability of authoritarian regimes, federal politics, political parties, ethnic conflict, governance and inequality in a comparative perspective. Providing both qualitative and quantitative data from 20 years of original research, the book draws on elite interaction, public opinion and the role of institutions regionally in the post-Soviet years. The regions vary on a number of theoretically interesting dimensions while their federal membership provides control for other dimensions that are challenging for globally comparative studies. The authors demonstrate the utility of subnational analyses and show how regional research can help answer a variety of political questions, providing evidence from Russia that can be used by specialists on other large countries or world regions in cross-national scholarship.

Situated within broader theoretical and methodological political science debates, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Russian politics, comparative politics, regionalism and subnational politics.

1 Studying Russia's regions to advance comparative political science

William M. Reisinger

Understanding Russia's regions is essential for understanding Russia. Even before the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, Russia's subnational units had begun to infuence its political, economic, and social evolution (Pavlenko 1993; Slider 1994; Morgan-Jones 2010). Regional infuences on the course of events in Russia continue unabated, despite Vladimir Putin's success at enhancing central control over the regions (on this process, see Gel'man 2009; Chebankova 2010b; Ross 2010b; Sharafutdinova 2010b).

In addition, these regions form a rich setting for comparative political analysis. Comparative politics “seeks to account for variation in outcomes among political units on consequential questions that have been posed in political theory” (Laitin 2002, 630). The Russian regions provide theoretically relevant contrasts along numerous dimensions. Their number and variety permit scholars to use diverse research methods, including statistical analyses. Despite varying in multiple ways, they belong to the same state. Comparing them thus may mitigate some potential dangers in cross-national inference (Snyder 2001). Scholars can analyze the regions to shed light on many of the core debates in comparative politics including those concerning democratization, political economy and state capture, civil society, and transnational infuences on politics. Russia's regions offer abundant opportunities to study such emerging concerns of comparative politics as hybrid regimes, subnational authoritarianism/democratic enclaves, and elections and parties in authoritarian settings.

The literature on Russia's regions is voluminous. Lowenhardt and White's (2000) bibliography of articles, books, or other works on regional issues or spe-cifc regions listed over 750 items. That number has certainly grown substantially since then. Not all this work is intended to address questions of comparative politics. Many are descriptive studies that track events or advocate policies. Even with this caveat, however, a gratifying amount of high-quality research uses the regions to answer comparative questions – an increase from the relatively few available in the late 1990s (Gel'man 1999, 939). Those represented in this volume are among the leaders in this regard. The chapters that follow illuminate a wide variety of topics: subnational political regimes, the Kremlin's strategy for replacing regional governors, popular evaluations of political candidates with and without party labels, the dilemmas of being a minor political party in the shadow of United Russia, ethnic Russian national identity and xenophobia, the policy effectiveness of regional governments, and income inequality.

For comparative analyses of the regions to go further, however, refection and debate are in order. Which theories have proven productive? What have we learned from statistical analyses that we could not have from other forms of comparison – and vice versa? What has been overstudied and what understudied? In this chapter, I hope to frame such a conversation by reviewing trends within the subfeld of comparative politics – theoretical approaches, logic of inquiry, methods, and subject matter – while noting where the research on Russia's regions fits along each dimension.

My review suggests a number of ways for future research on the regions to become even stronger. Perhaps the most important is for more analyses of the regions to be framed as contributions to comparative political analysis. As I discuss below, the comparative subfield has a menu of distinct approaches to general theory. Studies of the regions can contribute well to subfield-wide debates about theory but only when they connect their research questions to theoretical questions that pertain beyond Russia's regions and make explicit the theoretical assumptions guiding the research. A second area of potential improvement is the virtual absence of survey data using regionally weighted samples from multiple regions. As a result, quite little is known about how mass political values and behavior vary across the regions, in contrast, for instance, to the large literature comparing values and behavior across the US states. Finally, work on the regions to date has been concentrated in some areas of interest to comparativists while rarely attending to others.

Subnational units and comparative inquiry

My call to leverage the study of Russia's regions for insight into comparative politics comes at a time when the subfield more broadly is embracing sub-national analysis (see Moncada and Snyder 2012; Sinha 2012). For one thing, subnational units are politically important. In federal systems, of course, the political subdivisions are formally recognized as having important spheres of responsibility, which makes them important for how national-level politics evolve. The ways in which these political dynamics can play out, moreover, are complex (Stepan 1999; Galligan 2008). Even within unitary (non-federal) systems, sub national politics are often highly important and deserve study.

In addition, studying subnational politics offers the potential to overcome some of the challenges of comparative inquiry. Snyder (2001) made this case over a decade ago. For instance, subnational analyses can provide enough relevant cases to make statistical approaches justifable with less danger of conceptual stretching (Sartori 1970; Collier and Mahon 1993) than with an equal number of national cases. The federal system in Russia, for instance, consists of 83 regions, in Brazil of 26, in India of 35, in the United States of 50. Non-federal systems also provide important political variation across numerous subdivisions.

Using municipalities as cases enlarges those numbers even further, obviously. To compare a similar number of countries requires crossing continents and signi-ficant cultural boundaries. Even for analysts using non-statistical analyses, sub-national units can make it easier to identify what Lijphart (1971, 1975) called comparable cases or Przeworski and Teune (1970) called most-similar systems (Snyder 2001, 95–97).

Snyder argues as well (2001, 97–99) that subnational units, because they are smaller in some way (population, number of economic enterprises, etc.), have an inherent advantage in the quality of data attached to each unit. That is, the datum describing a whole country will mask what will generally be a substantial range of variation from region to region on that variable. Although this logic could be carried too far – cities are better than regions, neighborhoods better than cities – the gain in accuracy when moving from a large heterogeneous country to the subnational level is likely to be large.

At present, subnational research remains under-utilized because fieldwork outside the country capital has higher costs or risks, on the one hand, or data for subnational units are poorer or less available, on the other (Lankina 2012). Such barriers exist with regard to Russia's regions, certainly. Yet numerous high-quality studies of subnational Russian politics have overcome the practical challenges.

Theoretical approaches in comparative research

Contemporary comparative political research deploys a broad range of theories, refecting debates within the social sciences generally. To understand how research on Russia's regions has contributed to the subfield and where more can be done, I will distinguish different major approaches to, or favors of, theory common in the subfield. By a theoretical approach, I mean a preference for what provides causation and how. The boundaries between the approaches I will discuss are permeable. Scholarship that successfully incorporates insights from more than one perspective is and must remain prized. Nonetheless, comparativ-ists continue to discuss and debate theoretical approaches as options on the scholarly menu and to organize scholarly communities around them.

Depictions of the comparative subfield's major theoretical approaches have frequently been trichotomies. For example, Lichbach and Zuckerman (1997, 2009) use rationality, culture, and structure as the headings. Interests, institutions, and identities (Oberschall 1993; Kopstein and Lichbach 2005) comprise a similar breakdown. In each, the divisions flow from what scholars place in the forefront of their explanations. Although they acknowledge alternative causal factors, for reasons of clarity and parsimony they place other factors explicitly or implicitly at the margins.

I believe it most useful, however, to employ five categories. The trichotomies obscure two important distinctions within the subfield: between behavioral research and non-behavioral cultural approaches such as constructivism, on the one hand, and between rational-choice institutionalism and historical institution-alism, on the other. The five major theoretical approaches, therefore, are the: (1) behavioral (included in the category of “interests” by both Oberschall 1993 and Kopstein and Lichbach 2005 while treated as “culture” by Lichbach and Zucker-man 1997); (2) resources-oriented/bargaining (also “interests” for Oberschall 1993 and Kopstein and Lichbach 2005, “rationality” for Lichbach and Zucker-man 1997); (3) rational-choice institutional (“institutions” for Oberschall 1993 and Kopstein and Lichbach 2005, “structure” for Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997); (4) historical institutional (not treated separately from rational-choice institutionalism by any of the three); and (5) cultural (“identities” for Oberschall 1993 and Kopstein and Lichbach 2005, “culture” for Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997).

My five categories and the other authors' three categories all omit functionalist theories, which were once a major theoretical approach for comparativists. Functional approaches are associated with Durkheim (1893) and later Parsons (1951, 1964) and were brought into comparative politics by Almond (1960) and others. They have, however, fallen out of favor.¹ In contrast to functionalism's stress on systems and their equilibria, current theoretical approaches are overwhelmingly actor-oriented. The actors in these theories need not be human beings, but the theories all have decisionmaking and choice at their core. Moreover, recent theorizing “very often proceeds (or, more modestly, claims to proceed) from ‘microfoundations,’ that is, it starts from the individual, and her interests and beliefs, to then make predictions about aggregate outcomes” (Boix and Stokes 2007a, 21).

Let me now expand on the five approaches and how they have shaped work on Russia's regions. Behavioral theories differ from the other four approaches by being subjectivist rather than objectivist (or structural).² Subjectivist theories seek to understand why actors behave differently by examining the different things actors want. At the individual level, then, what is important are subjective beliefs, attitudes, and emotions, as well as how an individual processes information. It is the area in which Psychology has most strongly influenced Political Science (Sears et al. 2003; McGraw 2006; Mutz 2007).

Behavioralists study political culture, though without taking a culturalist theoretical approach. To describe a polity's political culture, behavioralists calculate the relative prevalence or absence of important individually held beliefs, values, orientations, or opinions.³ (As I discuss below, culturalists conceive of values, etc. as intersubjective, as properties of a social unit rather than an individual.) Inspired by pioneering works from the 1960s (Almond 1960; Eckstein 1961; Almond and Verba 1963; Pye and Verba 1965) and enabled by a growing infrastructure of survey research, comparative politics subsequently saw comparative studies of political values and culture explode (see the reviews by Fuchs 2007; Halman 2007). It continues to be an important component of the subfield.

Behavioralist studies of the regions include survey analyses of mass values or behavior, using representative samples drawn from one or more regions (e.g., Konitzer-Smirnov 2003; Hagendoorn et al. 2008; Holland and O'Loughlin 2010). They also include analyses of voting data from many or all regions to depict regional variations in mass values or behavior (Clem and Craumer 1993, 1995a, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2004; O’Loughlin et al. 1996; Wyman et al. 2002). Elite surveys to test hypotheses about how outlooks are distributed (Chirikova 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Ponedelkov and Starostin 2008) fall here as well. Behavioral theories can also be tested with data on the personal backgrounds of elites, and scholars have produced substantial information on the backgrounds of Russia's regional elites (e.g., Petrov 2005; Moses 2008; Turovskii 2009b; Blakkis-rud 2011).

Objectivist approaches, by contrast, emphasize the constraints that push actors toward or repel them from courses of action. Naturally, aims and constraints interact in producing behavior (as argued, for example, by Druckman and Lupia 2000), so dividing theories in this way can be overblown. Nonetheless, it represents an important difference of emphasis. One can see this difference, for example, in the running debate about whether mass values lead to democracy (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 2010; Welzel and Inglehart 2007) or democratic institutions forge certain kinds of outlooks and behaviors (Muller and Seligson 1994; Hadenius and Teorell 2005). Moreover, only through acknowledging the distinction can scholars incorporate both aims and constraints into an explanation.

Objectivist theories can be divided based on what is thought to constrain or stimulate behavior. One objectivist category begins with how resources are distributed within an arena. This distribution structures the expected outcome of an interaction. That is, it makes some outcomes more likely than others. Notwithstanding this structuring, works in this approach should be distinguished from institutional approaches. The resources in question may be entirely non-institutional, flowing instead from an actor's stockpile of information or weaponry, the level of his commitment, her strength of concern about an outcome and much more. In addition, the arena might be short-lived. The resources the actors involved in an interaction possess determines the outcome of each choice the actors might make and therefore their behavior. Game theory, of course, originated as the study of how rational actors would respond to different scenarios (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). Also numerous are less formalized approaches that assume less than full rationality, incorporating either incomplete information or actors concerned with more than maximizing their private gain or both (Simon 1955; Camerer 2003; Ostrom 2007).

Work in this tradition has produced a rich understanding of how different situations give rise to tactics and to modes of bargaining among the actors, even when that bargaining is tacit (e.g., Schelling 1960; Axelrod 1984; Downs 1990). In addition, it brought to prominence the challenges of social dilemmas, including the difficulty of motivating desirable collective action (Olson 1965; Rapoport and Chammah 1965; Muller and Opp 1986), which Ostrom (2007) argues is the key issue in studying politics. Comparative politics is seeing the growing use of game theory and related approaches (Bates 2007; Boix and Stokes 2007a, 6–7). Some of this work falls into the category I discuss below of rational-choice insti-tutionalism but not all. This is true as well of principal-agent theories and their applications, which can be pursued without making institutional rules central.

Stoner-Weiss's (1997) study of comparative governmental performance among four Russian regions in the 1990–1993 transition period fits in this category. Although it is institutional performance she studies, the driving force in her model is the regions' economic factor endowments at the start of the period and what that meant for how rational actors behaved. Likewise, Bahry (2005) compares the regions of Tatarstan and Sakha (Yakutia) to explore the federal-regional balance of economic resources and how that shaped efforts at regional sovereignty. I would also place in this category those scholars employing principal-agent theory to explain bargaining between Moscow and the regions (Gel'man 2006; Sharafutdi-nova 2010b; Gel'man and Ryzhenkov 2011). In principal-agent theories, asymmetries in power and information help explain the two sides' actions.

A second category of objectivist theorizing focuses on institutions, or sets of rules that, while changeable, are sufficiently firm that they cause people to act in response to them (March and Olsen 2008; on the institutions literature, see Rhodes et al. 2008). Within the institutional approach, two tendencies have held sway ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Basic information on Russia's regions and regional terminology
• 1 Studying Russia’s regions to advance comparative political science
• 2 Politics, governance, and the zigzags of the power vertical: toward a framework for analyzing Russia’s local regimes
• 3 Deference or governance? A survival analysis of Russia's governors under presidential control
• 4 Why do political systems become party systems? Addressing a cross-national puzzle through subnational survey data
• 5 Opposition parties in dominant-party regimes: inclusion and exclusion in Russia‧s regions
• 6 National identity and xenophobia in Russia: opportunities for regional analysis
• 7 Good governance: efficiency and effectiveness in Russian regional healthcare
• 8 Inequality and authoritarian rule in Russia and China
• 9 Making autocracy work? Russian regional politics under Putin
• Bibliography
• Index