Democratization in Russia: The Development of Legislative Institutions

The Development of Legislative Institutions

Jeffrey W. Hahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781563247200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315480992
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The development of Russian democracy has been a gradual process of maturation punctuated by dramatic events. This text examines events such as the first free elections, the Russian parliament's resistance to the 1991 coup, and the bloody confrontation with the military in 1993.

1
Introduction

Analyzing Parliamentary Development in Russia

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Jeffrey W. Hahn

When Boris Yeltsin abolished Russia’s parliamentary system in September 1993, he not only changed the “rules” of the game of democratic consolidation as it had been played up to that time, he put an end to the game altogether. With the adoption of a new constitution on December 12, 1993, new rules were established and the first Russian republic gave way to the second one. Not surprisingly, the new rules strongly favor President Yeltsin, the man responsible for drafting them. Whether these new rules can accommodate a transition to democracy in Russia is an open question. However, analysis of the reasons why the previous rules could not do so may help us assess the chances for success in the second Russian republic. In many ways, this book attempts to conduct a political autopsy of the first Russian republic, focusing mainly on its legislative organs. Why did the period of transition from 1990 to 1993 end the way it did? What can we learn from an autopsy about the prospects for democratization in Russia? More comparatively, what can we learn about the conditions that contribute to the emergence and maintenance of democratic political institutions?

The central goal of this book is to contribute to our knowledge of the process by which stable democratic parliaments develop. We shall seek to do so by examining the experience of Russian parliamentary institutions at the national and local levels from 1990 to 1993. Arguably, the political system of the first Russian republic met the minimum criteria for democratic transitions: the old authoritarian system had broken down, a “founding election” was held, and a new parliament formed. Russia in 1990–93 seemed poised to proceed with the stage of democratic consolidation. But this did not happen.¹ The Russian experience offers an unusual opportunity to understand the processes that underlie the consolidation of democratic institutions precisely because of what it tells us about the pathology of parliamentary development: what are the reasons that explain why democratic consolidation fails? This chapter has two purposes: to develop a framework of analysis for understanding legislative institutionalization in Russia, and to set the stage for what follows by briefly describing the main phases of Russian parliamentary development from 1990 to 1993.

Parliaments and Democratization

What can we learn from the rather extensive literature on the development of legislative institutions that can help frame the issues we want to address? To begin with, we need to establish the place of parliaments in the study of democracy.² Legislatures perform a number of functions crucial to democratic systems. Among these are: policy making activities (agenda setting, deliberation, adoption and oversight); representational activities (communication of constituency preferences, providing constituent services); maintenance functions (political recruitment, selecting leaders, mediating elite conflict).³ How these functions are carried out by legislatures varies considerably and legislatures can be classified accordingly. With respect to policy making, for instance, in strong legislatures (Polsby uses the word “transformative”), popularly elected representatives play a direct role in making laws, while in weak ones (which he calls “arenas”) their policy-making role is more indirect; they shape laws through debate, personal persuasion, and oversight. In what Michael Mezey refers to as “marginal” legislatures, representatives play little or no policy-making role, but may communicate policy in ways that contribute to maintaining the system.⁴ What distinguishes democratic legislatures is that of all the institutions of representative democracy, legislatures are designed to articulate citizen preferences in making decisions; legislators who fail to do so can be held accountable by those they represent. More simply, legislatures are the single most important representative institution in a democratic system. As David Olson and Michael Mezey put it: “The legislature, more than any other political institution, stands at the confluence of democratic theory and democratic practice.”⁵

The importance of legislatures to democracy is not limited to countries where democracy is already established. They may also be critical to the process of becoming democratic. In his essay “Transitions to Democracy,” Juan Linz writes, “One of the great challenges of the period between authoritarian rule and the first government based on free elections is the setting up of basic rules of the future political process meaning both the characteristics of the representative institutions to be elected and the electoral law.”⁶ In his view, democratic consolidation can take place only when a legal framework defining the rights and procedures by which legislative and executive institutions exercise their authority is in place. Parliaments offer an institutional framework for the mediation of social conflict. Only within such an institutional framework can contending players engage fruitfully in the politics of negotiation and compromise. Linz further argues that parliamentary regimes are preferable to presidential ones in transitional periods because they are more flexible and adaptable in times of crisis. Since they are bound to stay in office for fixed terms, presidents in such circumstances are more prone to “serious errors” of judgment. In Linz’s view, “during periods of transition and consolidation, the rigidities of a presidential constitution must seem inauspicious indeed compared to the prospect of adaptability that parliamentarism offers.”⁷

From the point of view of democratic theory, then, it seems clear that legislatures are a crucial element in democratic political systems insofar as they serve as the principal link between what governmental institutions do and what people want them to do. This is consistent with the view of John Stuart Mill as set forth in his treatise “On Representative Government.” Modern political science, however, finds this view overly simplistic. In the first place, the popular will is at best imperfectly reflected in legislative activity.⁸ More importantly, perhaps, it is clear that not all legislatures perform their tasks well. As Robert Putnam has shown, it is not enough for democratic institutions to be responsive, they must also be effective.⁹ While for democracies, the questions of representativeness and performance are closely interrelated, analytically they are distinct. In his seminal analysis of how stable political institutions get built, Samuel Huntington argued that countries can have sufficiently high levels of political participation (what Dahl would term inclusiveness) without well-developed political institutions, and vice versa. According to Huntington, the problem for developing nations is that high levels of participation without institutional development produce unstable “preatorian” polities, while the reverse produces unstable “civic” polities.¹⁰ Stable democracies need both popular participation and institutionalization.

This observation would seem directly relevant to understanding the development of legislatures in Russia and Eastern Europe. There, electoral mechanisms for broad participation were introduced before stable institutions were established, a problem sometimes referred to as “sequencing.” Levels of political participation in these countries were quite high, but the capacity of legislative institutions to process participation was not. The transitional parliaments of the former communist countries have been hampered from the outset by problems that have been largely resolved in more established parliamentary systems. Among those identified by David Olson are: lack of governmental experience, fragmented parties, constitutional ambiguity, the absence of committee systems, few and untrained staff, and unrealistic public expectations. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that communist countries must remake not only their political institutions, but their economic systems at the same time, a dilemma known as the problem of “simultaneity.”¹¹ As Olson puts it, “The new parliaments of the new democracies suffer from the paradox of too much work to do and not enough resources with which to function.”¹² In short, they lack institutional capacity.

For legislatures to be effective, then, it is not enough for them to be democratic (in the sense of Dahl’s polyarchy); they must also become stable or “institutionalized.” Indeed, in his more recent work on democratization, Huntington goes so far as to suggest that the concept of stability (or institutionalization) be incorporated into the definition of a democratic political system, although he recognizes that there may be more or less stable democracies.¹³ Larry Diamond goes even further, arguing that institutionalization is the most important factor in democratic consolidation, especially in countries seeking to introduce structural economic reform under democratic conditions. In his words:

In fact, a stronger and broader generalization appears warranted: the single most important and urgent factor in the consolidation of democracy is not civil society but political institutionalization. Consolidation is the process by which democracy becomes so broadly and profoundly legitimate among its citizens that it is very unlikely to break down. It involves behavioral and institutional changes that normalize democratic politics and narrow its uncertainty. This normalization requires expansion of citizen access, development of democratic citizenship and culture, broadening of leadership recruitment and training, and other functions that civil society performs. But most of all, and most urgently, it requires political institutionalization.¹⁴

But what does the term “institutionalization” mean? One of the earliest efforts at conceptualization was by Nelson Polsby in his analysis of the U.S. House of Representatives. For institutions to be “viable,” he wrote, they must become “institutionalized”—that is, “organizations must be created and sustained that are specialized to political activity.” For Polsby, institutionalized organizations are characterized by well-defined boundaries, organizational complexity, and “universalistic” rather than particularistic (personalized) criteria in the conduct of business.¹⁵ Subsequent definitions tend to view institutionalization as the development of set ways of doing things, the establishment (and acceptance) of specific rules and procedures over time. Loewenberg and Patterson define legislative institutionalization as “the process by which legislatures acquire a definite way of performing their functions that sets them apart. A highly institutionalized legislature has organizational inertia: it keeps on going as it has and is hard to change.”¹⁶ This definition comes closer to the analytical framework employed by proponents of “new institutionalism,” which is discussed below.

In sum, if we are to develop an analytical framework for understanding the development of democratic local and national legislative institutions in Russia, it seems clear that we need to address not one, but two central questions: Are they becoming more democratic (employing Dahl’s concept of polyarchy)? Are they becoming institutionalized? Since it seems clear that both democratization and institutionalization are essential, then we need to specify criteria by which to answer each of these questions. We look at institutionalization first.

Explaining Parliamentary Institutionalization

By what criteria do we distinguish levels of parliamentary institutionalization? There have been a number of attempts in the literature on comparative politics and, more specifically, comparative legislative studies, to understand this process. Some of them offer useful insights (and a number of testable hypotheses) for understanding what happened in Russia.¹⁷ Synthesizing this literature can be tricky since the same terms may hold somewhat different meanings depending on who is using them. However, three variables do appear to be critical in most analyses. Levels of institutionali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Analyzing Parliamentary Development in Russia
• I Legislative Development at the National Level
• II Legislative Development at the Local Level
• III The Lessons of Legislative Development in Russia
• Appendices
• Index