Mar 1, 1998 - of strong social cleavages of the type Lipset and Rokkan identified as ...... Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 'Cleavage Structures, Party ...
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Classifying Russia's party system: The problem of 'relevance' in a time of uncertainty Neil Robinson a a Lecturer in Russian Politics, University of Essex, Online Publication Date: 01 March 1998
To cite this Article Robinson, Neil(1998)'Classifying Russia's party system: The problem of 'relevance' in a time of uncertainty',Journal
of Communist Studies and Transition Politics,14:1,159 — 177 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13523279808415373 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523279808415373
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Classifying Russia's Party System: The Problem of 'Relevance' in a Time of Uncertainty
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NEIL ROBINSON Party development in Russia has been chaotic, but can be explained in part by looking at the interactions between Russian political parties. The application of Sartori's scheme for classifying party systems suggests that party competition in Russia shows signs of both centrifugal and centripetal pulls. This has several contradictory effects. Anti-systemic parties have their principled opposition to Russia's post-communist development reaffirmed at one level, but are sometimes forced into co-operation with the more powerful executive. Pro-systemic parties have little incentive to co-operate because they and members of the political elite do not face serious competition from anti-systemic parties. In consequence, there is unlikely to be a rapid streamlining of the Russian party system.
Between the first and second rounds of the 1996 Russian presidential elections the newspaper Segodnya published an article by five experts from the Centre for Political Technologies on what the election might mean for the future of Russian politics.' The experts extrapolated from the conduct of political leaders during the presidential campaign to assert that the basis had been laid for the development of a 'rational structure of party polities'. They noted that, after the high degree of party fragmentation in the December 1995 State Duma elections, politicians had learnt 'strategies of coalition building' in the presidential elections, and discovered that aspirants to political power needed to abandon their individual ambitions and join one of the two 'big coalitions' of 'reformists' or 'restorationists'.2 The prognosis of the experts at the Centre for Political Technologies was accurate for the presidential elections, where the 'big coalition' of 'reformists' triumphed over the 'restorationists'. Their suggestion that the presidential elections would produce a 'rational structure of party politics' is, however, far more problematic. The experts of the Centre for Political Technologies did not indicate what such a structure would be, but the inference was that it would Neil Robinson is Lecturer in Russian Politics at the University of Essex. He is the author of Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System (1995), and co-author of Post-Communist Politics: An Introduction (1997). He is very grateful to Maura Adshead for her help with this contribution.
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involve a fairly small number of coalitions and simplify the future electoral choice of Russian voters. The consequence might not be a breakdown into two parties based on reform and restoration of the Soviet past, but it would not be the confusing choice between 43 parties and electoral groups that faced Russian voters in the 1995 State Duma elections. It is, of course, impossible to predict how many parties will compete in the next State Duma election. But this study attempts to argue the opposite of that of the experts cited above: there may not be 43 parties at the next national elections, but there will probably not be a simple and manageable number (whatever that is) either. Many might agree with this 'hostage to fortune' intuitively, since we can guess that some version of quite a few of the major 1995 competitors will still be in existence and active in the next election. We could also point to the findings of work on opinion poll data, which show that, although political attitudes in the Russian electorate provide the basis of a 'party system without parties', there is still a large degree of flux and scope for party development and competition.3 The present argument has a different focus, however. Russian parties have not, with the exception of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), been particularly successful at exploiting cleavages and imposing electoral order on them.4 The failure of parties to act on cleavages is the product of many factors: the inadequate development of organizational capacity and a crowded market with 'low product differentiation' are two reasons that most readily spring to mind. These failings can be explained by looking at the particular cases of Russian parties, or by looking at the anomalies of the Russian party system and its development as a whole. This study tries to follow the latter path by putting forward some exploratory ideas about the nature of the Russian party system. Classifications of party systems are made in order to try to predict the behaviour of political parties by defining how they interact with one another, and using this definition to comment on the pattern of competition between them in terms of centrifugal (the movement of parties towards political extremes) and centripetal (the clustering of parties around centrist positions) pulls. Following Sartori, the standard method of classifying party systems works in two stages: parties are first differentiated according to how 'relevant' they are; then relevant parties are distinguished by the ideological distance that exists between them. The utility of this method of classifying party systems is not, as Alan Ware has pointed out, always high because competition in particular party systems often deviates from what is expected of party systems in theory.5 However, there is some use in following the analytical path mapped out by Sartori. Sartori presents several ideal types of party system, in each of which competition is patterned and predictable (even if the parties that actually compete cannot be predicted).
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Contrasting the Russian case to his ideal types can illustrate some of the factors that have worked to make the Russian party system peculiar. Moreover, Sartori's description of party systems focuses in large part on the interactions between parties as a key determinant of party development. These interactions are doubly important in Russia owing to the absence of strong social cleavages of the type Lipset and Rokkan identified as informing party development.6 I shall outline Sartori's scheme for classifying party systems and argue that there is no way that we can really view the Russian party system as corresponding to any of the types of multiparty system that Sartori defines because there is a combination of both strong centrifugal and weak centripetal pulls. This is because Russia has anti-system parties that behave as if they were in a polarized multi-party system, but which, in the case of the CPRF, are forced towards the centre to some extent by the absence of a clearly defined or organizationally strong political centre, by the institutional environment in which they exist and by their strength in comparison with what would be expected of anti-system parties in Sartori's scheme. This has several contradictory effects. It reinforces the polarized aspect of the Russian party system and makes it less likely that more centrist or reformist parties will act rationally and form alliances in order to increase their electoral chances. In consequence, there is little chance that there will be any consolidation of parties within the broad 'reformist' and 'restorationist' blocs in the immediate future. There will continue to be short-term, temporary alliances among politicians from both blocs. These alliances will be as liable to fragment and lead to new waves of party and movement formation as they were in previous electoral cycles. This tendency to fragmentation will continue because anti-system parties' behaviour is analogous to that of extremist parties in a polarized multi-party system. This behaviour has an impact on parties that are more reformist or centrist, or desirous of being reformist or centrist. It helps to ensure that there are low returns on party fidelity for moderate politicians compared with the incremental gains that can be made by having one's own organization and endlessly realigning for short-term advantage. This latter reason, explored in the last part of this study, is explained as a failure to develop state autonomy appropriate to democratic consolidation.7 This failure has meant that parties have not become, in Neumann's terms, the 'articulate organization of society's active agents, those who are concerned with the control of governmental power', and are not likely to develop in that way.8 For many of 'society's active agents', parties are irrelevant: there are other means of getting access to power, and parties are just vehicles for self-promotion - organizations that enable the elite to participate in one more form of political competition.
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Sartori's Scheme for Classifying Party Systems: Relevance, Ideological Distance and the Direction of Party Competition
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Sartori's scheme for classifying party systems starts by distinguishing between two types of party and their relevance within political systems.9 This is done by applying two counting rules. The first determines a party's 'government or coalition potential': a 'minor party can be discounted as irrelevant whenever it remains over time superfluous, in the sense that it is never needed or put to use for any feasible coalition majority.' The second defines relevance in terms of a party's ability to 'blackmail' other parties and alter their behaviour: a party qualifies for relevance whenever its existence, or appearance, affects the tactics of party competition and particularly when it alters the direction of the competition - by determining a switch from centripetal to centrifugal competition either leftward, rightward, or in both directions - of the governing-orientated parties.10 These two rules are, as Sartori recognizes, difficult to operationalize, since they are 'postdictive'." Sartori's way around the problem of the postdictive nature of counting, and his way of working from counting towards an analysis of the direction of party competition, is to use the count of relevant parties to determine the 'class' of party systems and then to look at the ideological distance between parties in a given class on order to establish a party system's 'type'. Sartori identifies seven classes of party system according to the number of relevant parties. We need concern ourselves with only two classes - 'limited' and 'extreme' pluralism.12 Limited and extreme pluralism are first distinguished by a rule of thumb that shows the degree to which a party system is fragmented by the number of relevant parties that it contains: a limited system has between three and five relevant parties, extreme pluralism has more. The ideological distance between parties is then added in order to form the type of party system: fragmentation plus significant ideological distance equals 'polarized multipartism', fragmentation minus significant ideological distance equals 'moderate multi-partism', or possibly 'segmented multi-partism', a subtype of moderate pluralism. The extent of ideological distance in a party system is decided above all by the presence or absence of anti-system parties, which aim not only to change the composition, but also the system, of government." Anti-system parties create polarized multi-partism because they introduce 'bilateral oppositions' of ideologically 'mutually exclusive' parties (usually of the far left and right, although these terms are problematic for the Russian case) that cannot form alliances to change government because the contest
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between them is a struggle over fundamental political principles. These bilateral oppositions also serve to create a centre party (or tendency if there is no single centrist party), that stands between opposing poles and faces resists and is defined by - them. The existence of a centre party or tendency is crucial since it determines the direction of competition in polarized multipartism. The direction of party competition is centrifugal, towards one or both extremes, because the centre position is occupied. This has several effects. Extremist parties have their ideological, principled opposition reinforced. Small extremist parties become ideologically fixed because their 'survival is best assured if their followers are indoctrinated as "believers'", and, as a corollary, larger extremist parties suffer from a 'law of contagion', and have to maintain their extremist position so as to avoid losing support to the smaller parties. Opposition also becomes 'irresponsible'. The centre party or tendency is not threatened by loss of power or position, since there is little chance that the extremes will accumulate enough support to acquire the potential to enter a coalition or government. This enables extremist parties to 'outbid' one another in making extravagant claims about what they will achieve if they take office. Moderate pluralism, and the sub-type of segmented pluralism, differs from polarized pluralism owing to the absence of anti-system parties. The ideological distance between parties is narrowed as a result and there are, depending on the number of relevant parties in the system, many and various possible ways of constructing coalitions. Consequently, party competition is centripetal because parties attempt to maximize their support and their chances of co-operating with other parties to form coalitions. Segmented pluralism is a variant of moderate pluralism that is associated with pluralist societies with sub-cultural or ethnic parties. These parties, like parties in moderate multi-partism proper, are not ideologically separated, but are organized from different cultural groups. They, therefore, like parties in polarized pluralism, compete for' support from distinct sections of the electorate, but once elected they can co-operate. The direction of party competition is thus centripetal in its final effect, although this competition is not strictly electoral in nature since the parties appeal to sociologically very different electorates. The Contradictory Drives of the Russian Party System Sartori's typology was developed from analysis of West European party systems. Some of the assumptions that underpin the above summary of his typology demonstrate this (for example, the idea that anti-system parties will only ever manage to acquire electoral support sufficient to make their role in the legislative and policy process one of blackmail is based on the
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place of the Partito comunista italiano in the Italian party system). Despite this, the typology is still useful because the two directions of party competition relate to Russia in a novel fashion. The Russian party system is peculiar - if not unique - in that it has both centripetal and centrifugal drives. These contradictory drives exist simultaneously because of the conflicting pressures that Russian political parties are under. The Russian party system is polarized because of the ideological opposition that exists between the large number of fragmented and relevant parties within in it.14 Not all these parties are electorally relevant, since they have not yet won seats either through the PR lists or in single-seat constituencies. However, many of them do affect the tactics of party competition and alter the direction of competition of the anti-system parties. Ideological opposites are not neat 'left' and 'right' antipodes in the Russian party system.15 The anti-system opposition is divided into two camps, which overlap but retain a degree of distinctiveness thanks to the main party within each bloc. One pole of the anti-system opposition is the bloc of communist successor parties. The largest party in this bloc (indeed the only mass party in Russia) is the CPRF. Other parties in this bloc are the smaller, more extreme or both: groups such as the Russian Party of Communists, the Working Russia group, and its sometime ally, the Russian Communist Workers' Party (RCWP) (together they made up the 1995 electoral movement 'Communists-Working Russia for a Soviet Union'). The ideological characteristics of these parties embrace nostalgia for the USSR's socio-economic system and power blended with Russian nationalism, anti-democratic and anti-system sentiment." Associated with this bloc of parties is the Agrarian Party of Russia (APR), a clientelistic party which represents a part of the agricultural nomenklatura and is allied with the CPRF.17 The other pole of anti-system opposition is based on nationalist-patriotic parties including the main party within the bloc, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and the 1995 electoral movements of Derzhava (Great Power) and the Congress of Russian Communities. The parties of this second pole share many ideological traits with the communist successor parties, particularly anti-Westernism, preference for state - rather than market - economic distribution, and political authoritarianism, although some parts of this general platform are obfuscated in individual party platforms and manifestos.18 The similarities between parts of the platforms of the communist successor and the nationalist-patriotic blocs have led them to take some common political action and make alliances: examples include the 'red-brown alliance' of the National Salvation Front; the co-operation between the nationalist-patriotic Russian Union of All the People and
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splinters from the communist successor bloc in 1995 to form the 'Power to the People' electoral bloc and the Narodovlastie (Popular Power) State Duma faction; the gathering together of various parties from both blocs (including the RCWP and Derzhava), to support the CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov's presidential election campaign; and the post-election attempt to set up a new political movement, the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia, from that campaign alliance." However, the two sets of parties should still be seen as distinct poles, since the competition between them involves matters of principle, and because the two main parties in each camp serve to reinforce the other's claim to distinctiveness in several ways. The LDPR is, in the words of one of its ideologists, 'the party of a leader. If there's Zhirinovskii there's a party, if no Zhirinovskii there's no party'.20 The CPRF, on the other hand, is a mass party with factional activity and policy debate. Attitudes towards the government also serve to distinguish the two main parties. On a day-to-day basis the CPRF has been far more resolute in its opposition to the government than the LDPR, whether it is over the war in Chechnya, the evolving political and constitutional order, or some more minor distraction such as the signing of Yeltsin's 1994 Civic Accord.21 The existence of a dominant party and several smaller parties in the two poles works to create some effects similar to what might be expected if they were at opposite ends of a classic left-right continuum. To some extent, and with variations over time and across parties, each camp is free to be irresponsible in its opposition and to make extravagant claims about what it would do if electorally successful. The smaller parties in each of the subsets of the anti-system opposition offer voters an alternative so that the larger parties have to protect their claims to an ideologically distinct position in order to retain their core support. Zhirinovskii has been scathing about the nationalist alternatives offered by Rutskoi, Lebed and the CPRF. The CPRF, whilst wishing to retain its ideological position, faces the dilemma of whether it should compromise on rhetoric so as to widen its electoral appeal. It is, as a result, uncertain about what it should emphasize in its programme. Its position is fixed to a degree, however, by the availability of other communist successor and national-patriotic parties, and by the alliances that it has tried to make to expand its electoral constituency.22 Alliances such as the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia can reinforce this ideological fixity. The CPRF is forced to reaffirm its antisystem opposition or risk being overwhelmed by 'the younger and more aggressive, passionate nationalist trend' with which it is allied.23 This reaffirmation of its anti-system opposition can run counter to the political activity of the CPRF in other spheres, such as the State Duma (see below). In turn, the tension between the CPRF as a party in the legislature and its place at the head of one wing of the anti-system opposition helps smaller
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parties to survive. The smaller parties can claim ideological purity in comparison with the CPRF, reflecting a hostility that goes back at least as far as the October events of 1993 when Zyuganov did not back the parliament's violent confrontation with the Yeltsin regime. An example of this emphasis on ideological purity in the smaller parties is the backlash in the RCWP against Viktor Anpilov, one of Russia's most prominent neo-Stalinists, after his support for Zyuganov during the presidential election campaign, and despite his opposition to the establishment of the CPRF-led Popular Patriotic Union of Russia.24 Anpilov was removed from his post as first secretary of the Moscow branch of the RCWP. He was subsequently kept out of the negotiations when an alternative alliance to the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia - tentatively labelled tne Union of Socialist Forces of Russia (the Russian acronym of which is the same as 'USSR') - was proposed by the RCWP and other hardline parties and organizations such as the Russian Communist Party-Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Officers' Union and the United Working People's Front.25 Irresponsible opposition and ideological purity limit the electoral appeal of the anti-system parties as they do in other party systems. Unlike other party systems, however, this is not the principal reason for their limited governmental potential. Despite their differences, the two poles of the antisystem opposition weaken each other electorally since they share the protest vote of the 'dispossessed' and the pro-authoritarian, nationalist, anti-market segment of the electorate. This dividing up of the vote is multiplied by the electoral options created in each camp by the large number of parties in each. The result is that the prospects of the main parties from the two poles allying to create government or coalition potential is slight (the LDPR and the CPRF have not co-operated beyond protest votes in the State Duma), and despite heading the PR vote in 1993 and 1995 neither party has managed to generate enough electoral support to control the legislative agenda unequivocally by negating the veto powers of either the Federation Council or the presidency. The other side of the ideological spectrum of the Russian party system is as fragmented as the anti-system opposition. Indeed, it is probably better to think of it as two distinct 'halves' of a pro-system position (pro-system in the sense that all are more or less democratic in orientation and in favour of the market as a major, if not the only, means of resource distribution). The difference between the two 'halves' has been a function of the extent to which parties support, and have their origins in, the government of the day. The composition of the two 'halves' has varied over time. In the 1993 State Duma campaign one 'hair comprised Russia's Choice and the Party of Russian Unity and Accord (PRES); the other 'half was Yabloko and some
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of the other democratic opposition parties including the Democratic Party of Russia and the Democratic Reform Movement. In 1995, one 'half was Our Home is Russia (NDR) and the Ivan Rybkin electoral bloc, while the other 'half comprised Yabloko, the renamed Russia's Democratic Choice and some of the other democratic opposition parties such as Vpered Rossiya! (Forward, Russia!). There are, of course, large differences between the policy positions of parties within each of these two sub-sets. In 1993, for example, Russia's Choice was more monetarist than PRES, and in 1995 it was more monetarist than Yabloko. But the distinction between 'pro-government and organized by government politicians' and 'anti-government and organized by politicians from outside of government' served to invent a weak, incipient form of a centrist tendency. Russia's Choice and PRES in 1993, and NDR and the Rybkin bloc in 1995, were defenders of the political and constitutional order, whereas the other parties were, to a greater or lesser extent, opposed to the way that the Russian constitutional order was developing and the general quality of Russian political life. Other positions on policy, such as Yabloko's opposition to the monetarist slant of Russia's Choice in 1993 and the energy-lobby economics of NDR in 1995, Russia's Democratic Choice and Forward, Russia!'s monetarist opposition to NDR gradualism and the Rybkin bloc's social protectionism, reinforced the division over constitutional order and support for the government.26 The centrist tendency that this created was clearest in 1995, when NDR and the Rybkin bloc were formed in an attempt to shape and dominate the 'centre' vote, but it was implicit in 1993. Divisions over constitutional order and the conduct of Russian politics have meant that the pro-government parties in both elections have been defined as representing the 'party of power' by both the anti-system parties and the non-government parties. In theory the pro-government parties - indeed, the party system in general faced the danger of votes flowing from the centre to 'extremes' (even if one of the extremes, represented by those democratic parties that were antigovernment and organized from outside of government, was not extremist). This danger, however, was never fully realized since the anti-government parties are reformist and thus bound to protect some of the 'gains' of transformation no matter what their specific criticisms of these gains are. As a result, their electoral potential is diluted because they cannot capture much of the vote that goes to the real anti-system parties and are reduced to fighting the pro-government parties for a share of the anti-communist, antinational-patriotic bloc vote. The Russian party system as a polarized system is thus somewhat deformed. The large number of parties creates fragmentation, but the behaviour that Sartori's definition of a polarized system might lead us to
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expect is only really observable among the anti-system parties. Among the other parties - broadly pro-market, pro-democracy - there is a poorly defined ideological centre created by the identification of some parties with the government and constitutional order, and no strong electoral centre. The absence of a strong centre has a significant effect on the Russian party system because it changes the behaviour of parties in the State Duma by creating a weak centripetal tendency. This tendency is not ideological: rather, it is forcedco-operation stemming from the need to occupy the space created by the absence of a real political centre and by the uneven distribution of powers between the legislature and the executive. This weak centripetal tendency was not really noticeable during the fifth State Duma elected in 1993. The patterns of co-operation between parties in the fifth Duma were multiple owing to the fairly even representation of party factions and groups from across the ideological board, and because of the emergence of three pragmatic factions, New Regional Policy, 'Rossiya' and Stability, that were formed largely, but not exclusively, from the large number of deputies elected as independents and representing regional interests rather than ideological positions." The relatively even distribution of seats between factions produced some balance in the Duma and meant that principled stands could be made by anti-system parties without the consequences being too great: pro-market, pro-democratic forces, the pragmatic factions, and moderate opposition factions (for example, Women of Russia), would moderate the tendency to confrontation. The two votes of no confidence in the government, in June and July 1995, are the best illustration of this. The first passed by 241 votes to 72, with high support from CPRF, LDPR and APR deputies (96, 82 and 88 per cent in favour, respectively), and high-to-moderate support from some of the other factions (100 per cent from the Democratic Party of Russia, 93 per cent from Yabloko, 63 per cent from New Regional Policy, 29 per cent from Rossiya). When a second vote of no confidence was held which would have forced either the dissolution of the Duma or the removal of the government, only the Democratic Party of Russia remained firm in its support of the motion, alongside the LDPR and the CPRF. The number of New Regional Policy and Rossiya deputies supporting no confidence fell to ten and three per cent, respectively. Yabloko support fell to 67 per cent, and APR support dropped to 60 per cent, a sign of its clientelistic, rather than anti-system, nature.28 The reputation of the anti-system parties was thus preserved, but so was the political status quo. The CPRF reinforced its reputation in the wake of the second no confidence vote by trying to start impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin, again with no result. The election of the Sixth Duma in 1995 changed matters. The CPRF's success gave it 157 of the Duma's seats and a plurality, which, when
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combined with the seats taken by APR and Power to the People, brought the CPRF close to a simple majority. The remaining seats in the Duma were fairly evenly spread between Yabloko, NDR, the LDPR and a new faction, Russian Regions.29 The simple majority that the CPRF can almost achieve with Power to the People and the APR can be used to pass Duma resolutions that symbolically reject the path of Russian political development. The most notable of these resolutions were those of March 1996 renouncing the Belovezhskaya Pushcha agreement establishing the CIS and validating the legality of the March 1991 referendum on the preservation of the USSR. Similar resolutions and votes have been passed on preventing the sharing of the Black Sea Fleet with Ukraine and on the status of the Crimea and Transdnestr. The CPRF cannot, however, muster enough support to challenge the executive on more important and practical questions. Just before the 1996 presidential election, the CPRF tried to introduce a law on the transfer of presidential power that would have increased Zyuganov's powers (had he won) before the presidential inauguration. It was defeated first by Yeltsin's veto, and then by a Federation Council vote. Restrictions on the sale of land proposed by the CPRF and APR were vetoed by the Federation Council. The Duma failed to overcome the veto by a two-thirds vote, and the APR began to waver on the rights of peasants to own land.'0 The Federation Council also vetoed a law on government that would have given the Duma the right to consider ministerial appointments, require any minister to attend Duma sessions if asked, and enable the Duma to place the 'power' ministries under the prime minister rather than the president. Yeltsin vetoed a law amending procedures for changing the Constitution. The CPRF was also unable to use its numbers to take full advantage of Yeltsin's health problems, or to vote no confidence in the government. The withdrawal of troops from Chechnya in November 1996 led to calls for a vote of no confidence and the initiation of impeachment, but no vote was held.31 Various attempts were made in the first few months of 1997 either to discuss impeachment or to pass laws clarifying the circumstances that would require the president to resign because of ill-health. There has thus been no translation of the CPRF's electoral success into decisive anti-system legislation. Worse, at least as far as the CPRF's credentials as an anti-systemic party are concerned, the party has been trapped by the need to compromise on the two most important pieces of Duma business in 1996: the confirmation of the prime minister after the presidential elections, and the passage of the 1997 state budget. Only 85 Duma deputies voted against Chernomyrdin's appointment as prime minister, with three abstentions. The vote was made anonymous as deputies
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switched seats to hide the fact that many CPRF and other opposition deputies voted for Chernomyrdin out of fear that rejecting him would lead Yeltsin to raise the stakes of confrontation by nominating an even more unacceptable candidate whose rejection would push the Duma towards invoking its own dissolution.32 The Duma rejected initial drafts of the 1997 budget, but in the end and after some concessions on spending, pensions and payment of wages, the majority of CPRF deputies supported the budget. The most consistent opposition to the budget came from Yabloko." The concessions that the CPRF made in the first year of the sixth State Duma show that, although the Duma parties are still ideologically differentiated from one another, their behaviour is not solely determined by this. Ideological differences have to be elided, either because co-operation is forced on the parties in the Duma by the weakness of that institution in relation to the executive presidency and the need to construct a two-thirds majority to overturn presidential and Federation Council vetoes of Duma decisions, or, as in the CPRF's case, because they cannot avoid sharing responsibility for certain types of government decisions such as the passing of the state budget.34 The CPRF is caught in a paradox: it is an anti-system party with coalition potential. It is unable to become a party of government, but is strong enough to have the major say in the passage of legislation through the Duma. Consequently, the CPRF has been obliged to co-operate with the government on .certain key issues. The result is not dissimilar to Sartori's idea of segmented pluralism, with sub-cultural or ethnic differences replaced by ideological ones. The gap between parties is as intractable as if it were between sub-cultural or ethnic parties since it is essential; but co-operation still results, and on key decisions the direction of party competition is centripetal - the CPRF has to be responsible in its opposition and not plunge the political order into crisis even as it tries to reaffirm its total, principled opposition to that order. State Autonomy and Party Failure The need to co-operate occasionally with the government poses an obvious difficulty for the CPRF in that it lays it open to charges from smaller or more extreme anti-system parties of being a part of the new state nomenklatura, and provides them with the incentive to organize separately from it. We have already mentioned the Union of Socialist Forces of Russia, established by neo-Stalinist parties as an alternative to the CPRF-led Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia. Former Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi has also registered a Popular-Patriotic Union (despite being on the committee of the CPRF's Union).35 Equally important, however, is the fact that the inability of the anti-system parties to transfer their ideological
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opposition into fully successful parliamentary action against the status quo serves to lessen the need for anti-communist forces to overcome their differences. Anti-system parties can be an electoral threat, but there is no need to balance them to protect access to political decision making because they have not threatened the fundamental policies of government or the institutions of the new Russian polity. The result of this is the preservation from the first period of post-Soviet politics of the pattern of party development among the parties that do not oppose the system: the impetus to create mass parties has continued to be weak and those parties that are created are often based on krugovshchina, the establishment of groups around personalities.36 This pattern of party development is both a product and a cause of the failure to create state autonomy conducive to, and symptomatic of, the consolidation of democracy in Russia. This form of state autonomy has been described by Rueschemeyer and his associates as a fairly strong institutional differentiation of the political realm of formal decision making from the overall system of inequality in a society. Without it, a significant role of the many in governance is inconceivable. Such institutional differentiation ... gives government and politics a certain autonomy from social power and privilege, but it certainly does not make structured inequality irrelevant." Securing such a measure of state autonomy involves striking a balance between removing political power from the hands of dominant social interests and preventing the power of state institutions from dominating all social interests. The role that electoral parties play in creating and safeguarding this particular form of state autonomy is obvious and simple: by aggregating social interests they ensure that there are checks on dominant social interests, and dominant social elites have to align their interests with those of some part of society through party organization and the mobilization of electoral cleavages, in order to secure representation and some voice in political decision making. In doing this, elites make a decision about their place in the political system: they move from having unmediated control over the state, and hence over policy outcomes, to being prepared, in Adam Przeworski's words, to 'subject their interests to uncertainty'.38 The historic roots of the failure to secure a form of state autonomy conducive to democratic consolidation in Russia lie in the way that it emerged from the USSR. Russia's path to post-communism emphasized the need to create executive autonomy rather than democratic state autonomy. Russia emerged from communism with a set of legislatures (national and local) that had been elected semi-democratically. The election of the
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legislatures had not signalled that elites were prepared to 'subject their interests to uncertainty'. The first Russian legislatures were founded as a part of Gorbachev's reform programme, not as the end-process of elite bargaining where certainty about the relationship of policy to elite interests is traded off for representation. Anti-reform politicians and groups within the Russian legislatures were under no obligation to respect change since their place in the political system was not conditional on their doing so. Moreover, the imperfections of interest representation - the uneven spread and organization of democratic forces; the fact that there were few nationwide interest associations such as trade unions that could compete politically - at the time that the Russian legislatures were founded meant that the legislatures did not reflect the full diversity of either elite or social interests. As a result, the refusal of sections of the legislatures to accept policies detrimental to their interests was shared by regional, industrial and other elites, who were not fully represented in the legislatures and who had not been involved in any bartering over the shape of decision-making processes, and hence did not feel bound to accept their results. The possibilities at independence of working constructively through the 1990 Russian legislatures were thus slight, a fact implicitly recognized by the creation of the Russian presidency in 1991. This was further compounded by the need both to stabilize and to reform the economy. The move to strengthen the presidency to avoid the problems of working through the legislatures and deal with economic reform only worsened matters. Forces from the legislatures struggled to contain the powers of the presidency in alliance with some sections of the economic and regional elites. Access to power was contested between the various democratic factions so that the shallow unity of democratic forces that had emerged in the late perestroika period ended. The result was the worst of all possible worlds: party development from within the pro-presidential and democratic camps fell off and seriously re-started only when the 1993 elections were called. The struggle to maintain the powers of the presidency - to maintain executive autonomy in order to reform the economy - could be secured only by trading off that autonomy and making policy concessions, for the sake of political survival. While this detached part of the economic and regional opposition from the legislatures and the political opposition (as, for example, when Civic Union fell apart and industrialist opposition weakened),39 it ensured that access to power by the fragmented interests of lobbies, rather than via parties representing aggregated interests, became the norm. The result of this process was that whereas executive autonomy was ultimately ensured by the defeat of the legislature and the introduction of a new constitutional order, there was no great movement towards state
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autonomy and need to create access to politics via consolidated party development. Sections of the central state and regional bureaucracies were captured by sectional and other elite interest groups so that policy making was dominated by elite groups. The last-minute party building before the 1993 State Duma elections could not alter this fact. Neither Russia's Choice nor NDR became electorally effective, and both suffered from the weakness that Panebianco identifies as intrinsic to parties organizing from government: they were 'weak organizations' with shallow social roots because they relied on the resources of government to provide them with the means to compete electorally and did not build up mass organizations or mobilize voters through strong organizational structures.40 This was made worse by the fact that neither Russia's Choice nor NDR represented the whole government, so that the commitment of government resources to them was not uncomplicated. In the case of Russia's Choice, access to resources was soon further limited because of its break with government. NDR has not suffered a similar fate as yet, although relations with the government are, according to the NDR Duma faction head Sergei Belyayev, strained by the 'natural conflicts' that occur between a party and government and the need to stop being the 'party of power' so as to become a party in some more 'proper' sense of the word.41 For other politicians, parties seem to be bargaining-chips, formed to create the possibility of making alliances and being involved in the game of politics at a level other than participation in power games within the executive. Indeed, party-building often seems like a second-best option to participation in power games within the executive, something that only losers (or potential losers) in executive power games undertake in attempting to force their way back into power, or to provide themselves with a bolt-hole. Establishing parties based on a leader and the resources that they can mobilize is still the norm even after the debacle of the 1995 elections, and the strengthening and organizational consolidation of existing parties is slow, as the case of Yabloko shows. Vladimir Shumeiko established a Reforms-New Deal movement before the 1995 election as a sort of personal political group parallel to NDR and loyal opposition, and has followed this by as a setting up an 'Orthodox Russia' movement.42 Aleksandr Lebed has been involved in multiple organizations: 'Third Force' supplemented his 'Honour and Fatherland' movement and was supposed to support his electoral campaign for the presidency; after the presidential elections he and 'Honour and Fatherland' were involved in the establishment of the movement 'For Justice and Order'; finally, he established his own Russian Popular Republican Party, which held its founding conference in March 1997.43 On one day in 1996 Segodnya reported the establishment of four socialist parties, one of which
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was to be led by Ivan Rybkin.44 At regional level, various parties have sprung up. Generally, these parties have been too weak to challenge incumbent elites effectively in regional elections, or have been used by them as vehicles for one election and have then fallen into abeyance. Regional elites have little incentive to engage in long-term party building since there are ample opportunities to secure access to power through influencing the vote in single-mandate constituencies or by personal connections, as well as through lobbies and other channels.45
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Conclusion It is impossible to classify Russia's party system by placing it in a neat category such as polarized or segmented pluralism, nor is it possible to infer from the behaviour of Russian parties or leaders that Russia is moving towards a particular type of party system. The peculiarities of the ideological space that Russian parties create and inhabit, contradictory centrifugal and centripetal drives, and the fact that elites are not under any great pressure to organize parties to ensure that they have access to political decision-making, have worked to prevent the simplification of party competition and have left party development unconstrained. The tendency for parties to proliferate does not seem to have been moderated since the 1995 State Duma elections and there are few signs of any pressures from either the anti-system parties, or from any other factor, for significant consolidation amongst centre and democratic parties. Of course, Russia is still - unless some political crisis provokes the State Duma's dissolution some time away from the next parliamentary elections, and as that time nears there may be some consolidation of parties. However, if there is no change in the pattern of party development, consolidation will most probably happen in a very crowded field and among parties that will probably bring with them only the personal resources of one or two political leaders rather than the resources of a mass party. Party leaders are thus likely to have a large number of possible choices of allies. Alliances will probably be fragile because of the ease with which one set of partners can be swapped for another according to the decisions of party leaders unconstrained by activists, strong party organizations or the threat of losing partisans amongst the electorate. There were a number of such alliances in the 1995 elections (such as the Pamfilova-Gurov-Lysenko bloc, or the Pre-election Bloc of Party leaders), but none performed strongly. The prospects for the relevance of parties in Russia do not appear to be much better than they are at present or have been in the recent past.
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NOTES 1. Segodnya, 28 June 1996. 2. A similar conclusion was drawn by CPRF leader Zyuganov in the wake of the second round of the presidential elections, although he classified the two parties as 'popular-patriotic' and the 'party of power'. Olga Kryshtanovskaya described the two sides as the parties of 'old power' and 'new power', 'yel'tsinite and zyuganovite', with all other political leaders 'politician-loners ... without elites or serious organizations': see Pravda, 6 July 1996; Izvestiya, 13 June 1996. 3. The phrase 'party system without parties' is from Stephen White, Matthew Wyman and Olga Kryshtanovskaya, 'Parties and Politics in Post-Communist Russia', Communist and PostCommunist Studies, Vol.28, No.2 (1995), pp. 183-202 (p. 198); see also Ian McAllister and Stephen White, 'Parties in Post-Communist Russia', Party Politics, Vol.1, No.1 (1995), pp.49-72. 4. On the exploitation of cleavages see E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1975). On the failure of Russian parties to represent distinct constituencies and the lack of 'distinctiveness' of Russian parties see Stephen White, Richard Rose and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1997), pp.146-7, 232-4. 5. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.148, 172-5. 6. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 'Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction', in Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967); see also White, McAllister and Rose, How Russia Votes, pp.64-7; Karen Henderson and Neil Robinson, Post-Communist Politics. An Introduction (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp.285-8. 7. The analytical direction of this study is thus somewhat similar to those taken by M. Steven Fish, 'The Advent of Multipartism in Russia, 1993-95', Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.11, No.4 (1995), pp.340-83; Grigorii Golosov, 'Modes of Communist Rule, Democratic Transition, and Party System Formation in Four East European Countries', Donald W. Treadgold Paper No.8 (1996); Richard Sakwa, 'The Development of the Russian Party System: Did the Elections Change Anything?', in Peter Lentini (ed.), Elections and Political Order in Russia: The Implications of the 1993 Elections to the Federal Assembly (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995); and Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.96-100. 8. Siegfried Neumann, 'Toward the Comparative Study of Political Parties', in Jean Blondel (ed.), Comparative Government (London: Macmillan, 1969), p.71. 9. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). References in this study will be to the excerpts from Parties and Party Systems in Giovanni Sartori, 'A Typology of Party Systems', in Peter Mair (ed.), The West European Party System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 10. Sartori, 'A Typology', pp.320-21; original emphasis. 11. Ibid., p.321. 12. A third class, 'atomized pluralism', has a superficial resemblance to the Russian party system. Sartori defines 'atomized pluralism' as 'a residual class ... a point at which we no longer need accurate counting, that is a threshold beyond which the number of parties whether 10, 20, or more - makes little difference.' The number no longer matters and for Sartori there is no point in analysing 'atomized pluralism' because parties have no observable effect on one another: Sartori, 'A Typology', p.325. At first glance the large number of parties and proto-parties in Russia makes its party system resemble Sartori's 'atomized' category, but Russian parties do influence one another. 13. The next two paragraphs are a summary of Sartori, 'A Typology', pp.328-39. 14. Fish also makes this point in 'The Advent of Multipartism in Russia, 1993-95', pp.363-4, but does not extend the argument to looking at how this affects the behaviour of parties because of the connections between communist successor parties and national-patriotic parties. While this is an important point, it should not disguise the differences that also exist
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between parties such as the CPRF and the LDPR. 15. A rough map of the ideological distance that this scheme tries to describe would be similar to Figure 5 in Fish, 'The Advent of Multipartism in Russia, 1993-95', p.378. A classification of the main Russian parties in the December 1995 State Duma elections by their positions on the war in Chechnya, constitutional order, economic reform and relations with CIS states can be found in Grigorii Marchenko, 'Rossiya mezhdu vyborami (Sotsiopoliticheskii analiz i prognoz sostoyaniya elektorata)', Polls, 1996, No.2, pp.101-15 (pp.102-3). 16. See, inter alia, Laura Belin, 'Are the Communists Poised for Victory?', Transition, Vol.1, No.22 (1995), pp.20-25; John T. Ishiyama, 'Red Phoenix? The Communist Party in PostSoviet Russian Polities', Party Politics, Vol.2, No.2 (1996), pp.147-75; Richard Sakwa, The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Electoral Process, University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy, No.265 (1996), and his contribution to the present collection; Veljko Vujacic, 'Gennadiy Zyuganov and the 'Third Road'", Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.12, No.2 (1996), pp.118-54. 17. Two of the main figures in the APR's history, its leader Mikhail Lapshin and one-time member Ivan Rybkin, were members of the CPRF Central Executive Committee elected after the ban on the party was lifted in early 1993: see Izvestiya, 16 Feb. 1993; my thanks to Jenny Kambakis for this reference. 18. See, for example, the confused blend of market and statist economics in Programmnyi manifest Liberal'no-demokraticheskoi partii Rossii (Moscow, 1995). 19. On the National Salvation Front and other links between communist successor groups and the national-patriotic bloc in the immediate post-Soviet period, see Gordon M. Hahn, 'Opposition Politics in Russia', Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.46, No.2 (1994), pp.305-35; on the foundation of the Popular-Patriotic Union, see Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 Aug. 1996. 20. Izvestiya, 4 Jan. 1994. 21. For a sample of Zyuganov's criticisms of Zhirinovskii and the difficulty of making any agreement with him, see the interview with Zyuganov in Kommersant-Daily, 6 July 1996. 22. On the ideological tensions in the CPRF, see Sakwa, The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Electoral Process, pp.8-9. On the possible limits to the CPRF's electoral constituency, see Nezavisimaya gazeta, 7 Aug. 1996. 23. Novoe vremya, 1996, No.35 (Aug.). 24. Segodnya, 9 Aug. 1996. 25. OMRI Daily Digest (e-mail version), 1996, No.140 (22 July), Part I; Kommersant-Daily, 15 Aug. 1996. 26. On the links between NDR and the energy lobby, see the analysis of documents that predated the establishment of NDR and called for creation of an electoral vehicle for energy elites in Kommersant-Daily, 16 Aug. 1995. 27. See, for example, the table giving the positions of factions and groups on 11 issues in 1993-95, in Vladimir Gel'man, 'Kommunisty v strukturakh vlasti: analiz deyatel'nosti', Vlast, 1996, No.6, pp.20-29 (p.24). On the independent deputies as the core of a centrist position in the 1993 Duma, see Oleg T. Vite, "Tsentrizm" v rossiiskoi politike (Rasstanovka sil v Gosudarstvennoi dume i vne ee)', Polis, 1994, No.4, pp.29-36. 28. All figures are from Liam Halligan and Boris Mozdoukhov, 'A Guide to Russia's Parliamentary Elections', CTE Briefing, 1995, No.1, p.28. 29. The formation of another faction, possibly to be called 'Industrial Union', with deputies from APR, CPRF and Power to the People factions, has been discussed but has not so far been formed: Kommersant-Daily, 8 Feb. 1997. 30. Segodnya, 20 Jan. 1997. 31. Kommersant-Daily, 30 Nov. 1996. 32. Segodnya, 7 and 13 Aug. 1996. 33. Segodnya, 16 Dec. 1996. 34. Thomas F. Remington and Steven S. Smith, 'The Early Legislative Process in the Russian Federal Assembly', in David M. Olson and Philip Norton (eds.), The New Parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 166. 35. Kommersant-Daily, 26 Sept. 1996. 36. Peter Lentini, 'Electoral Associations and their Programmes', in Lentini (ed.), Elections and
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Political Order in Russia, p.260; Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, p.94. 37. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p.63. 38. Adam Przeworski, 'Problems in the Study of Transition to Democracy', in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p.58. 39. Michael McFaul, 'Russian Centrism and Revolutionary Transitions', Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.9, No.3 (1993), pp. 196-222; Linda J. Cook and Vladimir E. Gimpelson, 'Exit and Voice in Russian Managers' Privatization Strategies', Communist Economics and Economic Transformation, Vol.7, No.4 (1995), pp.465-83. 40. Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.69; see also Fish, 'The Advent of Multipartism in Russia, 1993-95', p.361. 41. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 5 Nov. 1996. 42. Segodnya, 28 Nov. 1996; Nezavisimaya gazeta, 25 Dec. 1996; OMRI Daily Digest (e-mail version), 1997, No.29 (11 Feb.), Part 1. 43. Segodnya, 28 Feb. and 6 Sept. 1996; Izvestiya, 31 Dec. 1996; OMRI Daily Digest (e-mail version), 1977, No.53 (17 March), Part 1. 44. Segodnya, 12 April 1996. 45. Just before the 1995 elections Leonid Smirnyagin described the influence of regional elites on elections as an 'inescapable evil' and cited cases from the 1993 elections as evidence: see Segodnya, 21 Nov. 1996. On the influence of elites more generally in party politics and elections see D.V. Badovsky and A.Yu. Shutov, 'Regional'nye elity v post-sovetskoi Rossii: osobennosti politicheskogo uchastiya', Kentavr, 1995, No.6, pp.3-23; Grigorii Golosov, 'Russian Political Parties and the "Bosses": Evidence from the 1994 Provincial Elections in Western Siberia', Party Politics, Vol.3, No.1 (1997), pp.5-21; John T. Ishiyama, 'The Russian Proto-parties and the National Republics: Integrative Organizations in a Disintegrating World?', Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.29, No.4 (1996), pp.395-411.
