Politics and Legitimacy in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Martin Brusis, Joachim Ahrens, Martin Schulze Wessel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137489432
• eBook ISBN: 9781137489449
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Political legitimacy has become a scarce resource in Russia and other post-Soviet states. Their capacity to deliver prosperity has suffered from economic crisis, war in Ukraine and confrontation with the West. Will nationalism and repression enable political regimes to survive? This book studies the politics of legitimation in Post-Soviet Eurasia.

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The Politics of Legitimation in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Martin Brusis

The Eurasian successor states of the former Soviet Union hold regular elections, but few political regimes in the region meet democratic standards. Despite the color revolutions and subsequent protest movements, which have shown that the manipulation of elections entails considerable risks for incumbents, non-democratic arrangements of political rule have emerged and persist in many of the region’s states. In fact, most of these political regimes have survived public protests and other challenges or threats originating from elite disagreements, ethnic divisions and economic crises. The causes and conditions of this robustness, however, are not yet well understood among scholars.

A growing body of research aims to explore the sources of stability in authoritarian regimes across the world (for reviews of the literature, see Gandhi and Lust-Okar, 2009; Magaloni and Kricheli, 2010; Morse, 2012; Brancati, 2014). One key finding in this literature points to the role of political institutions such as elections, ruling political parties and legislatures; these perform important functions for authoritarian incumbents, for example, as tools of co-optation, credible instruments of self-constraint or channels of societal information. These important insights have solidly challenged the assumption that formal political institutions are merely facades behind which authoritarian rulers wield discretionary power. Moreover, the use of elections as instruments of authoritarian rule has led scholars to suggest that we are witnessing a new ‘electoral’, ‘competitive’ type of authoritarianism that differs from ‘closed’ or ‘full’ authoritarianism and democracy (Schedler, 2006; Levitsky and Way, 2010).

However, the ambition of combining large-n evidence with generalizability has led many scholars in this new wave of research on authoritarianism to adopt instrumentalist or rationalist views of institutions that are most amenable to formal models which ignore national contexts (Bueno de Mesquita, 2003; Gandhi, 2008; Magaloni, 2008; Svolik, 2012). Defining institutions primarily as sets of rules that structure interaction, these approaches focus on how utility-maximizing political actors engineer institutions and their regulatory functions. These approaches, however, neglect the fact that institutions also serve legitimatory functions which are embedded in shared historical and cultural experience. But authoritarian rulers cannot simply create political institutions at will. Institutions are more than equilibria, reflecting the preferences of political actors whose behavior they are to regulate (March and Olsen, 1989).

This volume features contributions from scholars who in principle concur with this theoretical position. Their common aim is to study the legitimatory dimension of non-democratic political regimes and the relationship between institutional legitimacy and stability. Based upon an empirical concept of legitimacy that considers legitimacy beliefs and their justifications (Beetham, 1991), institutional legitimacy is conceived here as the functional and normative appropriateness of institutions with regard to shared interpretations and beliefs. This notion assumes a plurality of sources, modes and patterns of legitimation from which political actors can draw upon when either claiming or contesting the legitimacy of institutions.

This volume focuses on a single region, post-Soviet Eurasia (PSE), in order to investigate the impact of historical and cultural references common to this area. For many scholars, PSE is deemed to include Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasian and Central Asian successor states of the former Soviet Union. However, valid arguments can be made in favor of excluding specific states from this group, including other states, dividing the overall region into more homogenous subregions, or studying Russia separately. Research interests and theoretical considerations must inform decisions regarding the definitional scope of this region and the selection of individual countries.

Since this volume studies the politics of legitimation in non-democratic regimes, it seems appropriate to focus on those states that share the legacy of the former Soviet Union and its assumed relevance for legitimation, but which have not established stable democracies. It should be noted that the term ‘non-democratic’ refers to more and less authoritarian political regimes as well as hybrid regimes situated between full autocracy and consolidated democracy. Moreover, our volume’s goal has not been to examine all post-Soviet Eurasian states systematically. Rather, the contributors have identified cases encompassing a single or several countries within this region as examples in order to examine questions of wider regional and theoretical relevance.

The conceptual framework for these empirical studies is outlined in this chapter. This chapter explains the relevance of institutional legitimacy for post-Soviet Eurasia and discusses approaches to distinguishing modes of legitimation. It is claimed that struggles over the legitimacy of political institutions are crucial for the stability of non-democratic regimes. The politics of legitimation affects conflicts between rival elite factions, the level of popular support accorded to incumbents and the strength of civil society, because institutional legitimacy shapes both the distribution of resources among political actors and the beliefs held by citizens.

1. Why institutional legitimacy matters

We can look at several features of non-democratic regimes in the post-Soviet and other regions of the world to help explain the importance of institutional legitimacy. First, the legitimating function of elections is a defining attribute of the new authoritarianism that has not been explicitly included within influential contemporary conceptual frameworks (Gerschewski, 2013, p. 18). The recent notions of ‘electoral’ and ‘competitive’ authoritarianism aspire to be more parsimonious than the ‘classical’ definition of authoritarianism proposed by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan which includes ‘distinctive mentalities’ and legitimacy as a key feature of ‘democratic-authoritarian hybrid regimes’ (Linz, 2000, p. 159; Stepan and Linz, 2013, p. 20).

According to Andreas Schedler, ‘[e]lectoral authoritarian regimes play the game of multiparty elections [but] violate the liberal-democratic principles of freedom and fairness so profoundly and systematically as to render elections instruments of authoritarian rule rather than “instruments of democracy” ’ (2006, p. 3). This definition acknowledges that elections do not de facto serve to select political elites, but rather to reinforce the popular belief that political elites are selected in competitive elections and to cultivate this interpretation among external actors. For elections to become ‘instruments of authoritarian rule’, a majority of citizens need to believe that they do, in fact, regulate access to power. If incumbent political elites were to give citizens cause to perceive elections as a ‘game’ rather than a serious competition, the elites would lose their legitimacy.¹

Similarly, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way stress that ‘[c]ompetitive authoritarian regimes are civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents’ (2010, p. 5, italics added). This definition suggests that popular views about the appropriate competitiveness of elections are the key constraint to incumbents’ ability to retain power.

Second, post-Soviet authoritarian regimes differ from other autocracies because they lack sufficient alternative sources of legitimacy. Since fraudulent elections have frequently evoked protests aimed at emulating the popular mobilization of the color revolutions, incumbent elites have ample grounds to be worried about sustaining the legitimatory function of elections. This concern constrains the extent to which they can manipulate outcomes at their discretion. Responding to protests with increased repression could jeopardize the permissive consensus among those citizens who had hitherto tolerated or were indifferent to electoral irregularities. Increased repression would also entail high political costs by damaging, for example, the regime’s international legitimacy. Governments in several PSE countries have therefore sought to render increased levels of repression legitimate by adopting more restrictive rules on association and assembly rights that endow law-enforcement agencies with the legal justification to prosecute civil society organizations and activists.

Post-Soviet political elites cannot draw on alternative sources of traditional legitimacy that are still available in the authoritarian monarchies of the Gulf region, for example. Legitimating visions of development are either discredited or (at least) suspected of utopism due to the memory of the failed Communist experiment. Post-Soviet regimes thus depend on their capacities to produce mass prosperity, security and other common goods (Sil and Chen, 2004, p. 363; Feklyunina and White, 2011, p. 401). This systemic performance, in conjunction with incumbent presidents’ associated technocratic knowledge and personal charisma, has been an important source of legitimacy. However, this performance has suffered from the global economic crisis that has hit Russia and other post-Soviet countries harder than China and other emerging markets with authoritarian political regimes.

Given the dearth and erosion of alternative legitimacy sources, since 2012, the Russian government has increasingly resorted to mobilizing nationalist sentiment (e.g., Rubtsov, 2014). Russia incorporated Crimea in 2014, claiming that the peninsula constitutes a historical part of Russia, that its residents feel closely tied to Russia and that Crimea’s ethnic Russian and Russophone majority populations required protection against threats of forced assimilation emerging from the new Ukrainian government. Russia also supported separatist insurgents in the Eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk who claimed to represent the interests of Ukraine’s Russophone citizens. Opinion surveys indicate that these policies – or their heavily biased public communication through state-controlled media – were welcomed by many Russians. Thus, one may infer that they contributed to reinforcing the legitimacy of Russia’s incumbent political leadership. However, the appeal of nationalism in the medium to long term remains uncertain, as citizens ultimately begin to feel the associated economic and political costs and as Russia’s dependence within the international system becomes more visible.

Third, political regimes in Eurasia have partially opened up access to political office and policy-making through legislatures, the mass media, parties, interest associations and non-governmental organizations. These institutions are assumed to support governing by co-opting critics, conveying unbiased information from society to the regime and exposing regime officials to public scrutiny. To perform these functions, these institutions require legitimacy. In other words, non-governmental actors and the broader public must be convinced that these institutions incorporate different societal interests within the activities of political representation and participation. By establishing and permitting representational institutions, the political regimes in turn endow reform-oriented political actors with institutional and legitimacy resources available to constrain executive discretion.

Fourth, Eurasian states are characterized by a dualism of formal and informal institutions that has been described with reference to concepts such as ‘neopatrimonialism’, ‘patronal presidentialism’, a ‘dual state’ or ‘substitutions’ (Hale, 2005; Timm, 2010; Petrov et al., 2010; Sakwa, 2011). The extent to which formal political institutions can be successfully employed by a regime depends upon whether informal institutions (for example, clientelism) perform complementary or substitutive coordination and orientation functions. These informal practices may not be disclosed to the public because doing so would render the formal institutions illegitimate (Beichelt, 2014, p. 57). Labelling United Russia a ‘party of crooks and thieves’, for example, was so damaging to the party and Russia’s political leadership because this (evidence-backed) assertion publicly revealed the existence of informal practices and thus delegitimized an important political institution.

2. Modes of legitimation

While most states in the PSE region may be described as electoral authoritarian regimes that rely on elections as the key legitimatory institution for the exercise of political rule, elections are clearly not these states’ single source of political legitimacy. Political elites in the region who have lost or depleted their electoral source of legitimacy continue to draw upon a repertoire of strategies to claim legitimacy. What other sources exist and how do different modes of legitimation interact to ensure the stability of political institutions in these countries? Scholars have proposed a variety of answers to these questions.

One of the most differentiated and theoretically grounded analyses of legitimation and legitimacy in Russia has been elaborated by Leslie Holmes who complements the Weberian modes of traditional, charismatic and legal–rational legitimation by distinguishing eight additional modes of legitimation based on empirical observations (Holmes, 2015, 2010, 1993). These modes include the ‘goal rationality’ suggested by Harry Rigby (1982) as a means of describing the teleological legitimation dominating late Communist systems; ‘eudaemonic’ legitimation which is based on satisfying the populace; official nationalism, identifying or contrasting with Russia’s past; and three modes of external legitimation: international recognition, support from foreign leaders and the emulation of external role models (Holmes, 2015).

Valentina Feklyunina and Stephen White identify the promise of economic modernization as one of the three official narratives used by Russia’s political elite to address the post-2008 economic crisis and the threat it posed to regime legitimacy (Feklyunina and White, 2011). According to Eugene Huskey, Russian exceptionalism – that is, Russia’s collective identity that centers on being different from the West – combined with technocracy as a method of rule constitutes the key sources of regime legitimacy in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia (Huskey, 2013, 2010). For Rudra Sil and Chang Chen, Putin’s vision of a resurgent, unified and assertive state, Russia’s international image as a great power and the country’s economic performance appear to be the most important and effective legitimatory devices (Sil and Chen, 2004; Chen, 2011). Edward Schatz distinguishes Central Asian authoritarian regimes according to their primary legitimacy claims that include international engagement, charismatic authority and anti-Islamism (2006, p. 269). Anna Matveeva argues that political leaders in Central Asia base their legitimation on their achievements in state-building and their guarantees of stability and security, but they have not been very credible in drawing legitimacy from Islamic symbols (2009).

Scholars have only recently begun to compare sources of legitimacy and legitimation modes across a wider range of non-democratic regimes (Kailitz, 2013; Grauvogel and von Soest, 2014). In a comparison of 72 authoritarian and democratic countries, Bruce Gilley measures state legitimacy based on opinion and expert surveys, tax revenues and electoral turnout (Gilley, 2009). He finds indicators of good governance, democra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• 1. The Politics of Legitimation in Post-Soviet Eurasia
• 2. Comparing Legitimation Strategies in Post-Soviet Countries
• 3. State Capitalism in Eurasia: A Dual-Economy Approach to Central Asia
• 4. Legitimation and the Party of Power in Kazakhstan
• 5. Legitimacy and State-Led Economic Policy in Georgia
• 6. Legitimacy, Accountability and Discretion of the Russian Courts
• 7. Concepts of the Nation and Legitimation in Belarus
• 8. State Programs, Institutions and Memory in Russia
• 9. Cynics, Loyalists and Rebels in Recent Russian Fiction: Literary Scenarios of Legitimation and the Pursuit of ‘Sovereign Democracy’
• 10. Comparative Conclusions: Legitimacy and Legitimation in Eurasian Post-Communist States
• Index