The Russian Parliament: Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989-1999
The Russian Parliament: Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989-1999
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Overview
Focusing particularly on the emergence of parliamentary parties and bicameralism, Remington explores how the organization of the Russian parliament changed, why some changes failed while others were accepted, and why the current parliament is more effective and viable than its predecessors. He links the story of parliamentary evolution in Russia to contemporary theories of institutional development and concludes that, notwithstanding the turbulence of Russia’s first postcommunist decade, parliament has served as a stabilizing influence in Russian political life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300129762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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The Russian Parliament
Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989-1999By Thomas F. Remington
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2001 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-08498-6
Chapter One
Political Representation and Parliamentary PowerIn this book I shall explore the emergence of Russia's parliament between 1989 and 1999. This period can be divided into three phases, the first two of which overlap. The first phase began in 1989 with the establishment of a new legislative structure designed by Gorbachev to replace the old Supreme Soviet. This stage ended with the August 1991 coup and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union. The short life of the legislature of the Russian Republic (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR) in the 1990-93 period is the second phase. This structure, formed one year after the new USSR legislature continued to function as the parliament of an independent Russia after the breakup of the union. Closely modeled on the USSR-level parliament in its organization, this RSFSR parliament followed a similar historical trajectory toward catastrophic demise in 1993. Then, following Yeltsin's forcible dissolution of parliament in September 1993, a new Federal Assembly was created in December 1993. The 1993 constitution and the Federal Assembly it established remain in force as of this writing. (See figure 1.1 for a timeline of these phases and table 1.1 for a list of the dates of the USSR and RSFSR Congress and Supreme Soviet sessions.)
The immediate purpose of this book is to trace the emergence of two crucial representative institutions over the decade from 1989 to 1999-parliamentary parties and bicameralism. In doing so I hope to shed light on the more general problem of explaining how these features of parliamentary organization have contributed to the stabilization of political conflict in Russia and to explain how new representative institutions are adopted by political actors who are engaged in an all-out contest for power. The rapid succession of legislative forms in Russia over this period offers us a valuable case study in the creation of democratic institutions because in the compressed time span of a decade, three different sets of legislative arrangements have been established.
Skeptics might object that Russia's parliamentary evolution is incomplete and that the institution itself is too much an instrument of presidential domination and the play of powerful and wealthy outside interests to justify a serious examination. If parliament does not constrain elite political behavior significantly, what theoretically interesting conclusions can be drawn from a study of its formation?
Certainly institutional choices in recent Russian politics have been driven by a fierce power struggle in which the very definition of the state is at stake. By and large, Gorbachev and Yeltsin wrote constitutions that served their immediate power needs and imposed them on the country. When Gorbachev proposed a new two-tiered parliamentary system with competitive elections at the Nineteenth Party Conference in summer 1988, the erstwhile Soviet parliament, the USSR Supreme Soviet, dutifully went along and gave him the constitutional amendments that he sought. When Gorbachev wanted to establish a presidency for himself, he forced it through the new parliament and had himself elected to the post by the parliament. Yeltsin, for his part, introduced a Russian presidency to counter Gorbachev, pushed to weaken and dissolve the Soviet Union, finally disbanded the Russian parliament when he could no longer tolerate its opposition, and proposed a constitution creating a new parliament to the country in a nationwide yes-or-no vote: vote for my constitution, or face the consequences of chaos, he implied. The voters gave him the constitution he wanted. It is a constitution that gave him as president the power he demanded to enact policies over the opposition of all but the most concerted parliamentary opposition. In the pursuit of power, Yeltsin wound up the winner, president of an independent Russia, with a strong presidency facing a weak parliament. On the face of it, anyway, the period is hardly a story of the triumph of democratic institutions.
Because coercion and intimidation were used to force the pace of change, new representative bodies, such as the parliament, have made little apparent headway at taming power, the task that White, Rose, and McAllister regard as uppermost for Russia's development: "In the United States the very act of invoking the Constitution to justify actions implies recognition of the rule of law; it also accepts that presidential actions can be challenged and even nullified in the courts. In Russia, by contrast, the word for political power, vlast', refers to domination by the powers that be. Yet democracy is not a system of domination; it is about taming power. In Russia, there is a need to tame vlast on a continental scale." If constitutional reform has been motivated by the struggle for vlast', and if the winners have always shaped institutional arrangements to strengthen their power positions, then once we have accounted for one contender's victory over another, what is left to explain?
If Russia's institutional development in this period were really so simple, there certainly would be no need to probe more deeply. But there are some problems with this account. For one, if winners always knew what they wanted, and always got their way, how can we explain the disastrous outcomes of their behavior? If Gorbachev could whistle up institutions to suit his interests, why did his reforms result in the collapse of the country and his humiliating exit from power? Why did Gorbachev first reject the idea of creating a presidential system, then embrace it? Why did Gorbachev's apparently tractable creature, the parliament, which was firmly controlled by his longtime ally Anatolii Luk'ianov turn against him and join with his enemies in the August 1991 coup? Why did Yeltsin reject the idea of dissolving parliament in fall 1991 when many of his advisers sought new elections, or a new constitution, or both, and accept it in September 1993, when his opposition was vastly more powerful? And who, in 1993, would have predicted that by decade's end, both the first and second State Dumas should have served out their full terms while President Yeltsin would have voluntarily resigned seeking his nation's forgiveness? It turns out that the history of constitutional forms in this period is one of improvisation, uncertainty, experimentation, and miscalculation. Evidently the game was more complicated than it seems because institutional choices had consequences that were neither desired nor expected by their authors.
There are more puzzles. Despite Yeltsin's use of force to disband parliament in 1993, and the heavy loss of life that followed from the shelling of the parliament building after his opponents rose up to seize power, all major sections of organized political opinion immediately agreed to participate in the new parliamentary arena he decreed into being. Moreover, his fiercest antagonists wound up playing by the rules of the parliamentary game. Even more surprising, so did Yeltsin. For instance, in August 1998, when the Duma credibly signaled that it would not accede to Yeltsin's pressure to confirm Chernomyrdin as prime minister-as it had done for Kirienko in April 1998 under the threat of dissolution and early elections-Yeltsin surprisingly backed down and nominated a figure far more to the Duma's liking.
The point is that institutional choices have unforeseeable consequences because of the way they guide subsequent interactions of the relevant political actors. The establishment of new arrangements for deciding the outcome of political competition changes the stakes or payoffs of the game. If institutions are instruments by which political actors achieve such ends as shaping policy for their community, or simply gaining power and status for themselves, they may devote resources to acquiring influence over the institutions. New institutions bring new participants into the political arena and alter the calculations of those already in the game. Moreover, new or changed rules of the game affect the players' expectations about what other players will do. Once actors revise their expectations about how others will behave, they may act differently themselves. Actors adjust their mutual expectations and adapt their behavior in order to achieve their goals. Some may prove successful at taking advantage of new opportunities presented to them. Rivals may collude to raise the hurdles to entering the game in order to shut out any further competition or loosen the barriers to entry to admit more potential allies. New contenders arise to challenge the previous majority by finding new issues and conflicts to exploit. They may press in turn for new institutional reforms that broaden their access to power. Because the groups are now organized, it becomes much costlier for the rulers to go back to the status quo ante. At moments when politically repressive regimes begin to liberalize representative institutions, the demands for still wider participatory rights can have explosive effects. A good example is the effect of the opening of the electoral arena under Gorbachev. The opportunity to win parliamentary mandates motivated activists to use the election campaigns of 1989 and 1990 to mobilize followings around such popular causes as nationalism and democracy that had not been organized or represented before.
In this book I will argue that the accretion of institutional changes over this period resulted in a Federal Assembly that has been more stable and more effective than its two transitional predecessors. Not only has it survived far longer than either, it has also had some success in taming the naked struggle for power. Certainly it has had a greater capacity to exercise influence than anyone anticipated, Yeltsin included. But the increase in parliament's institutional capacity did not come about through a process of adaptive evolution to the greater demands of a new political environment. It came about because the design of the Federal Assembly incorporated new sets of representative rights that gave political actors a reason to abide by the new rules of the game. The adoption of these features was the outcome of a series of institutional choices made by politicians seeking to satisfy more immediate interests. The bargains they struck on sharing power turned out to have a significant cumulative impact on the way they interact in the parliament, and the way parliament interacts with the larger political system. The case illustrates the point that institutional choices can have consequences that differ from the objectives that the actors had in creating them.
In the case of the parliament, if the new Federal Assembly is more effective than its predecessors, this fact would influence the behavior of the president, interest groups, courts, regional leaders, aspiring party leaders, opinion leaders, business, and other political actors. A more effective parliament would be a powerful impetus toward the consolidation of a democratic political system-toward taming vlast'. Since parliaments are a central feature of democratic political systems, the way they are formed and the way they make decisions has a significant impact on other elements of the political system.
PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRATIZATION
The premise that the way a parliament is organized will affect how well it represents diverse interests and exercises influence over policy making needs to be elaborated. That parliaments are crucial, even defining, features of democracy is not disputed. William Mishler and Richard Rose cite John Stuart Mill's observation to the effect that the best type of government is that in which: "the whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power." They observe that parliaments are virtually universal institutions and that "leaders of diverse persuasions certainly behave as if legislatures are conducive to the success of democratic governments." Wherever democratic government has struggled to replace authoritarianism, legislative institutions are established or reformed.
Why are parliaments central to modern democratic government? Two answers recur throughout the literature on parliamentary institutions: people want to have a voice in government decision making and consider parliaments an indispensable (if never entirely perfect) means for giving voice to their desires; and parliaments universally are institutions by which elected representatives confer legitimacy on legislative decisions. Without legislative bodies to give their approval to policy decisions, power-holders rule without being held subject to deliberation, debate, and formal approval by a body of elected representatives. Without an effective legislature to check it, the executive aggregates demands and makes decisions alone, whether the wielder of executive power is a Politburo, a monarch, or a military junta. Over many ages and in many different societies people have designed legislatures for the purposes of representation and decision making.
A well-established axiom in political science holds that no one set of legislative arrangements can simultaneously maximize both the objectives of representativeness and effectiveness in decision making. A legislature that is perfectly representative of a populace would include every member of the society and deliberation and decision would be coterminous with the life of the society. Most basically, representative institutions economize on a community's scarce resources, such as time, but at the cost of narrowing and simplifying the range of options available. Much as a mass meeting can readily be reduced to frustrating incoherence by the diversity of demands for issues to consider and the number of people who want their voices heard, a perfectly representative law-making body would be ineffective. Therefore, to be able to form a collective will, a representative body requires a means for reducing the complexity and diversity of demands to a smaller number of alternative decisions that can then be voted on. To represent the collective choice of the body, at least one of the options must be able to command the support of a majority. If more than one alternative is supported by the required minimum number of members, there must be an institutional means for choosing one over another, lest instability result through the inability of a majority to reach a decision. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a legislature that always endorsed the legislative proposals of a dictator would be efficient at decision making, but representative only in the most trivial or negligible sense.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Russian Parliament by Thomas F. Remington Copyright © 2001 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
By far the best study yet written on post-Soviet political institutions in Russia or anywhere else in the former Soviet Union.
—Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University