Washington Profile
www.washprofile.org
March 10, 2006
Russia’s Political Parties
An interview with Henry Hale
Henry Hale is an assistant professor of political science at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He specializes in issues of ethnic politics, democratization, federalism, and political parties, frequently with a focus on the cases of the former Soviet region. His first book, “Why Not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism and the State” (Cambridge University Press), will appear later this year.
Washington Profile: How do you assess Putin’s reforms to the party system in Russia?
Henry Hale: My sense is that the reforms have a variety of effects. But if we are thinking primarily about the party system, I think it actually has the effect of strengthening the party system for a number of reasons. One reason is a lot of the reforms explicitly give parties additional footholds in the political system that they had not proven able to win on their own. The most obvious example is of course the Russian Duma, which will now be elected entirely by party list, whereas before, half of the Duma was elected in single member districts, and in those single district elections. Party nominees at least over the last 10-15 years, have tended to win about half of the seats. Again, that depends on what you count as a real party. I am talking primarily about major parties. A similar effect is going to be had by, or is already being had by, the reforms of the provincial legislatures, which basically institute proportional representation elections for roughly half of the legislators that are elected to those bodies, although there is a more complicated formula there. So in that sense, there are some ways in which the party system is directly increasing the role of political parties. And then there are some more indirect ways that gets at the idea of party substitutes. I think a lot of political competition in Russia is not just simply between political parties and independents. What you have had in Russia is a competition between political parties and a variety of other kinds of political actors such as politicized corporate conglomerates that have fielded their own candidates at various times. Regional political machines run by governors which have been often either nonpartisan or feebly partisan, or fickly partisan, which means they frequently switch their allegiances. So that a lot of the reform Putin has conducted, such as weakening the role of governors in the political system and eliminating gubernatorial elections, have had the effect of eliminating some of the most important actors or forcing some of the more important independent actors to work through parties to achieve their aims, or to weaken those actors, or subordinate them to central authority in a way that they can be more easily channeled.
…Take a look at governors, for example. By strengthening central controls over governors, it became much easier in 2003 for the Kremlin to insure that a large number of governors ran on the party of power’s party list in the Duma elections. So there are almost 30 governors that appeared on the United Russia party list that year, whereas before it was very difficult for the Kremlin to get the governors to actually lend their own names to these party lists. By pressuring or altering the way in which governors or financial industrial groups or corporate conglomerates can operate in Russia, making them more dependent on the Kremlin, it has made it easier for the Kremlin to channel them into a party framework, and in particular, into one particular party or into certain parties that the Kremlin might favor, and most importantly United Russia.
WPF: Why has the West opposed these changes for the reasons you just touched on, or are there other reasons as well?
HALE: The main criticism that has been leveled at these reforms is that they amount to a constriction of the political space. Just in the sense that removing governors from the realm of elected officials gives voters one less set of choices to make about who is actually governing them. That is one reason… Just the fact that governors will be behaving in a more partisan manner doesn’t mean it is a pro-democracy reform. So at the same time that you are seeing a constriction in the space that is allowed for free competition in Russia, I do think that you are seeing a move towards a political system that is more dominated by political parties than has been the case in the past. Of course the party that is benefiting most is the pro-government party, United Russia.
WPF: Can you talk a little more about the phenomenon that is United Russia? Where did it come from and what is the secret behind its success?
HALE: On the one hand, it is just one in a whole series of parties of power that have been created by the Kremlin for its various needs. It is in the same vein as Yeltsin’s attempt to create Russia’s choice in 1993, Our Home is Russia in 1995, and the Unity bloc in 1999 all for the Duma elections. On the other hand, I think it is something that is qualitatively different from previous attempts to form parties of power for a couple or reasons. The most important of those reasons is that it wasn’t initially conceived as a party of power. It was more of a campaign, a tactic, because when the Unity bloc, out of which United Russia grew, was initially founded, late in the fall of 1999 in the run-up to the Duma elections, there really wasn’t a sense that this party had a chance to win. One of its main roles was to try and draw support away from the rival party which was being led by Moscow mayor [Yuri] Luzhkov and at the top of the ticket Yevgeni Primakov of the Fatherland All Russia bloc, which was expected to win. Unity was a tactic supposed to draw away votes from this bloc, and thereby hurt the presidential aspirations of the Primakov-Luzhkov tandem. In that it had success, but one of the key reasons was because you had the rise of Vladimir Putin at the time whose popularity was going through the roof due to the military operations in Chechnya. And so what had initially a campaign trick, took on a great deal of new life of its own. Its popularity began to rise dramatically, and in the end it finished a close second place to the Communist Party, and dealt a really heavy blow to Fatherland All Russia…The Kremlin team was surprised by what had happened. They realized, I think at that point, the usefulness of having a political party structure which could help take away votes from other parties, but also provide a significant base of support for the Kremlin in the Duma, and most importantly, could channel support from governors and corporations that might have otherwise supported an opposition party. On that basis, the effort only then was started to turn Unity into something bigger. Eventually, it absorbed what was left of the Fatherland All Russia coalition, and then became something that resembles much more closely the kind of party of power that we had seen in the past. Another exception is that Putin put a lot more effort into promoting United Russia then Yeltsin ever did with Russia’s Choice or Our Home is Russia. Over time, United Russia was able to build a very strong structure through the reforms that I was talking about earlier: the Kremlin was able to channel a lot of Russia’s most important resource holders into supporting United Russia, not entirely exclusively, but mostly.
I think over time it actually picked up a good deal of idea capital, in terms of how it connects with voters. United Russia isn’t just this completely administrative organization that is not associated with any ideas. People have a fairly clear sense of at least what they think United Russia stands for, and they are very consistent. It tends to be pro-market reform, anti-socialism, pro-presidentialism, against a decentralization of power, more or less Western oriented, and supported by people who think that the economy is improving, so people give it at least some credit in what they see to be economic growth in Russia. You find very strong tendencies for people who share those views to vote for United Russia disproportionately.
WPF: Is this a uniquely Russian phenomenon or are there other historical precedents?
HALE: There are certainly a lot of places whose party system is characterized by one strong party, and then maybe a series of minor parties that don’t really have a chance of taking power. Examples that frequently come to mind are the LDP in Japan or the PRI in Mexico. But there are questions about to what degree United Russia could really emulate the success of these other parties. For example, if we look at the PRI in Mexico a lot of its authority came from its association with the revolution there. There are certain other economic factors that played into its relative success. It’s not clear that United Russia has really taken on the degree of authority in the population like the PRI had in Mexico.
WPF: Throughout Russia’s history, we have seen various ideologies which have competed for power. What kinds of ideas are competing within Russia today?
HALE: One way to answer that question is to look at how parties divide along ideas. We have seen different sets of parties being associated with different sorts of ideas. One thing that’s happened in Russia is that we’ve seen United Russia take over the right wing niche in the population, meaning the support for, in particular, greater market reforms. I think that’s one problem the Union of Right Forces has had: earlier, it would get credit among those people who thought the economy was moving in the right direction. Now much more strongly it’s United Russia who gets credit for that. Other parties have carved out different niches; Yabloko has done a reasonably good job of carving out a niche as Russia’s main pro-democracy party. But I think it hurt itself in that endeavor in some past elections by maybe not taking that stand as strongly and clearly as it could. In 1999, when it allied with former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, is one example of that. Then of course you have a stronger nationalist-populist and somewhat leftist strand of thinking. There has been a lot of competition for that niche over the years in Russia, but certainly Rodina has successfully captured it in 2003, and of course the Communist Party much further on the left, was also able to capture that niche. If you look at the survey results of what people think, you find that people do see the major parties as standing for some sets of ideas, and you find that their voting decisions are frequently based on those sets of ideas. There are important competing strains of ideas that are reflected in party politics in Russia. That said, I certainly think that there are parties that do well that don’t have a basis in ideas. Zhirinovsky’s party, for example. There is a certain set of ideas that he consistently espouses, but the support for that party doesn’t seem at all related to the particular ideology that it espouses; instead I think it reflects more of a protest vote, or a reflection of Zhirinovsky’s own personality. Finally, to say that there is a competition of ideas out there doesn’t mean that it is a fair competition. So clearly, the ideas associated with United Russia have been greatly privileged given the biases in the state-controlled media, restrictions on campaigns and the advantages that come to incumbent authorities in Russia.
WPF: Would you say this kind of biased support of political parties and state control of the media is typical of new democracies?
HALE: Well, certainly you can point to a large number of countries that are somewhere in between democracy and dictatorship, where there also exists very tight control over media, with some limited media freedom, where certain views can be publicized or circulated in newspapers for example, but when it really counts, certain views are privileged over others.
The question to ask is not whether it is typical of new democracies, but whether countries that are in this position are really necessarily heading one way or the other. One of Putin’s arguments has been that democracy takes a long time to develop. And certainly in some cases that has been the case. But just because a country is somewhere in between does not necessarily mean it is heading eventually towards a more democratic path. We’d like to hope that it will be the case… as Russia gets more economically developed, it will be more democratic…but we can’t say this is typical of an emerging democracy because we don’t necessarily know where it’s going. It could also be typical of a country that is reverting to autocracy. The bigger question is where we think Russia is in fact going.
WPF: Is there a political niche yet not carved in Russia?
HALE: I think there are a lot of Russian parties out there, and a lot of political entrepreneurs that are trying to cover every possible point of view which could win votes in a significant number. And indeed the Kremlin itself has explicitly gone out and tried to cover those very same niches. For example, just in case post-industrial values or environmentalism start to have an appeal, you have the Party of Life which emphasizes those issues, which has been quite pro-Kremlin and has been associated with some of Putin’s associates. I would think in terms of the set of parties, most of the niches have been covered. The one niche that in my view has not been adequately covered or even sought after, but in my view does have some potential, is a truly democratic party. I think even parties like Yabloko, which has come closest to that, shy away sometimes from the strongest possible pro-democracy, pro-human rights stance for fear that this would actually be unpopular in Russia. In 1999, if you look at the opinion polls, there was an electorate for an anti-war approach to solving the Chechen crises, but even Yabloko at that time waffled, and you had a lack of a clear position espoused by Yavlinsky, and he was saying different things then what Stepashin was saying. I think while Yabloko is making more of an effort to espouse democratic views, it’s in a tough position at the moment because of its electoral losses in the previous two elections. So I think this is a niche that could be important in Russian politics, and my guess is that a party that espoused it consistently with leaders that had credibility in the population could easily clear the seven-percent barrier to parliament, with a good campaign of course, but that’s still a lot of speculation.
WPF: How do you see Russian democratic processes evolving in the next five to ten years?
HALE: It’s a very difficult task to predict the future in Russia… We’re likely to see a few things happen. We are likely to see increasing dominance of political parties in the political system. It is becoming much more of a party system than it has been in the past and that is likely to continue, thanks in part to the reforms, but also there is a sort of natural tendency of politicians, as long as there is some form of electoral competition, to organize themselves into political parties. Then on the other hand, it seems that it is the pro-Kremlin party that is going to do well in this system. This doesn’t necessarily mean United Russia. The people that support Putin have a wide variety of views, and they support him for different kinds of reasons, and not everyone who supports Putin likes what the United Russia brand has come to stand for. So there has been talk about either dividing United Russia into different wings, more conservative, more left-leaning, perhaps even sponsoring or creating a different party of power which would also have strong ties to the Kremlin but would advocate more leftist views. It’s entirely possible that this sort of project will be implemented in the future. Whether or not it will take is another question…
In fact, it’s been fairly rare that a completely new party has been able to break into the Duma without being the primary party of power… Our Home is Russia in 1995 was able to do it, but that was Chernomyrdin, Unity in 1999, and United Russia in 2003. In that light, Rodina was the main exception. I think there is a chance that sort of project could succeed, but again, there’s been a lot of attempts that have failed. Nobody now remembers the Rybkin bloc of 1995, the party bloc created to go along with Our Home is Russia. There is a lot of uncertainty about what we are likely to see, but one thing that I think we are likely to see is a set of parties that has closer ties to the Kremlin. But if we think in even longer terms, my guess is that we are likely to see a new outbreak of some kind of political competition in Russia, even if you get parties that are primarily Kremlin sponsored; as long as they do advocate different points of view, the competition between them can come to take on real meaning. And that doesn’t mean that voters will be given a full voice in politics, but at least they would have some voice in determining in which direction the country goes… I think if you start to get a split even among Kremlin parties, the people that are assigned to work in the different parties start to get an interest in promoting the views that their parties are associated with, because they would ultimately prefer to be the winners, rather than the losers. So at the same time that voters may start to get a little more input into the system, you start to get the possibility of competition at the elite level... I think this becomes more and more likely when Putin makes clear… or other people start to be really confident that he is in fact going to leave office.
My best guess is that what we are likely to see in Russia in the near future are alternating periods of political stability that looks a lot like a dictatorship, when you have a president firmly in charge and when you have elite groups who all want to please the president and don’t want to fall on the wrong side of the president for fear of punishment. But punctuated by periods of sometimes fairly intense political competition among political elites, and the political parties with which they are associated with, whenever there is a succession. It’s not always clear that the incumbent president will be able to get his or her person elected into office once you get this political competition, the outcomes become somewhat uncertain. These periods will look like something a little closer to democracy, but are really a competition among political machines.