Issues, Identities, and Programmatic Parties. The Emerging Russian Party System in Comparative Perspective
Herbert Kitschelt and Regina Smyth
Abstract
The task of this paper is to report some tentative results from a survey among Russian politicians about the programmatic structuration of the Russian party system. Our research is motivated by our previous work. On the one hand, we have conducted in-depth studies of candidate strategies in Russian parliamentary elections (Smyth 1997). The basic theoretical argument here is that politicians quickly learn to take advantage of the institutional opportunities of the electoral system and the local resources in the political setting where they compete. On the other, we have completed a comparative study of programmatic crystallization and party competition in four East Central European polities (Kitschelt et al. 1997). The theory that explains variance among the patterns of party system formation encountered in these countries has implications for Russia. It argues that historical legacies, configured around the institutions and processes of the late communist polity, mediated by actors’ rational strategies to advance their control of positions of power in the new democratic polities account for different pathways of democratic competition in post-communist countries. Placing Russia in a comparative setting, its system of party competition should look more like Bulgaria’s than that of Central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. At the same time, there are institutional differences between Bulgaria and Russia in the new democratic order that lead us to expect less programmatic structuring in Russia.
Our account attacks two other common perspectives on post-communist politics. First, there is a tabula rasa view according to which in newly formed democracies politicians are unable to make programmatically coherent appeals because they know little about the setting of competitors in which they are placed or about their voters. Voters, in turn, know little about politicians, and are even unlikely to identify their own political interests, let alone organize around them. Both voters and politicians are expected to be slow in taking advantage of the new democratic institutions. In our paper, we attack this view as far as politicians’ mapping of the competitive space is concerned. There is considerable level of programmatic structuration even in the Russian political space of party competition, although it has a different content and is not as clear-cut as in some East Central European countries.
Second, there is the communist legacies view postulating that the basic similarity of institutions and power relations in the former communist regimes produce similarities of party systems in the new democratic polities across the entire region. There are some undeniable legacies all post-communist countries share. But in this paper, we emphasize the differences among them in our comparison of our Russian findings with those of other East Central European countries.
Our results are preliminary for two reasons. First of all, this is the first tentative analysis of a Russian politician’s survey conducted in the spring of 1997. Second, we are in the process of repeating the politicians’ survey several times over the next twelve months (??? Regina, specifics) to get a better sense of the stability or volatility of the arrangements we have identified in the first survey. We first lay out the theoretical arguments that drive our paper (section 1). We then discuss the design of our study (section 2) and report initial results with regard to the level and the nature of programmatic structuring in the Russian party systems (sections 3 and 4).