Steven Fish in his book “Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics” (2005) said that a decade and a half following the break down of the Soviet system, Russian democracy is in tatters. Subsequent to the impressive political breakthroughs during the late 1980s and early 1990s, democratization gradually comes to a stop.
As the 1990s passed and the new century started, a lot of the gains and benefits of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era were in danger.As maintained by Ross (2004), in the year 2004, during the time of Vladimir Putin’s reelection as president of Russia, the country’s experimentation with open politics was over. Fish (2005) said that Russians live in a more open polity compared to their situation during the Soviet era. Moreover, Russian citizens likewise live a freer political existence compared to the inhabitants of certain lands of the previous Soviet Union.
Fish (2005) also asserted that Russia did experience considerable democratization. Not like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Russia did not pass from one type of autocratic police state to another.In his book, Fish (2005) elucidates why Russia, not like several of its other post communist neighbors, failed to achieve democracy. Russia was considered to be the fundamental body of the Russian territory and then the Soviet bloc. The country’s path of political change following the end of communism could not be ordered by foreign powers or be forced by mechanical imitation of foreign models. The country had the bureaucratic, economic, cultural, and military resources to come up with its own choices.
Hence, social scientists regard Russia as the big “independent” case in the postcommunist world.The country had to chronicle, and has chronicled, its own direction. More significantly, the destiny of regime change in Russia is of enormous practical significance. Russia is regarded as the core power in the post communist period, and its politics have an effect on all other nations in the region.
Furthermore, Russia is likewise a primary player in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Russia is also one of the world’s top three producers of natural gas and oil and also considered as one of the world’s two great nuclear powers.Thus, what happens to Russia’s democratization has been, and continues to be, fundamental to international politics and security. Unlike other literature, Fish (2005) do not agree that historical and cultural factors offer convincing explanations for the failure of democratization of Russia. Fish (2005) does not believe that a possible reason could be the decisiveness of the country’s degree of economic development. Fish believes that the country’s economic policy has affected democratization.
However, contrary to other literature, Fish asserts that that a deficit, instead of a surfeit, of economic liberalization has weakened democratization.Next, the country’s exceptional gift of natural resources has slowed down democratization, but in a manner that varies from what one finds in other resource-abundant nations. Moreover, Fish contends that the preference of a specific institution – the constitutional provision for a powerful presidency and a weak legislature – has undermined democratization. Moreover, Russia’s politics is also a factor that hindered the country’s democratization. Politics in Russia Political parties have a significant role in the typical political systems of northern industrialized democracies.Political parties link political and civil society, improve the supposed interests of individuals, groups, and social strata while at the same time aspiring deliberately to expand and improve these constituencies, and offer a connection between the state and society, supporting the contentions of the one and imposing the rules of the other.
Ideally, political parties offer accountability and representation, electoral pressure for partisan electorates, and the source or foundation for structuring political decision or preference in the competition of interests in the political field.Thus, political parties serve as a fundamental aspect of representative or typical democracies, and hence are considered as the bedrock for the process of democratization. Nevertheless, Russia's conversion to democracy in fact has been slowed down by the development of an exceedingly unstable and dysfunctional party system. For one to have a better understanding of the sad condition of Russia's contemporary party system, one must study and evaluate the motivations concerning the choices preferred by self-interested political elites.For instance, the wish of those people who already have power to maintain it and the desire to acquire the "goods" of political office-particularly personal enrichment and power -by those who look for them, have unfavorably affected party system formation.
Moreover, these motivations likewise have had an effect on the structure of the institutions of government with which the parties communicate, establishing a political environment that lessens the importance of the part played by parties.Incidentally, Russia's transition to achieve full democracy played a fundamental role, since it served to improve the freedom of action of the political elites, permitting them to better mold the political system consistent with their desires. Basically, two factors have a profound impact on the development of Russia's party system: the course of the initial transition and the role of elites during and after the transition period.The sudden break down of the Soviet system disrupted the development of the nascent party system, breaking its connections to society and leaving it to be reconstituted from above by elites in conditions that limited its connections with the society and the political system. In these situations, the parties became led and governed by the elite.
Afterwards, the subsequent changes made to the whole political system during the the period of 1993-95 and 1999-2000 election cycles have strengthened the party system's weakness to the behavior of the elite to the detriment of developing connections between civil and political society.Moreover, those changes likewise shaped the incentives for elite action in a manner that have led away from the development of a well-structured party system. After the 1993 election, there were three changes in the party system dynamic. The first change was that, inspite of having held the first post-Soviet period election, the party system was infact undermined. This is not to deny the reality that in the advent of the 1993 election, a lot of the insignificant parties did not survive or that there were merely six "effective" parliamentary.According to McFaul (2001), for a consolidated democracy, this is a high, but not unreasonable, number.
In the same manner, party activity happened to be more centered around elile-to-elite instead of elite-to-society interaction. Hence, it can be said that Russian politics is more and more becoming limited to private, top-level intrigues. Nowadays, the rudimentary multiparty structure is drying up. For instance, faction leaders have an agreement to change or transform the committee system to serve their own purposes instead of the purposes of governing the country.
Economic Problems of Russia According to Fish (2005), during the 1990s, there were two major economic phenomena that have converged in Russia. The first phenomenon has been the explosive growth and growing incorporation of the global capital markets as international investors have looked for new opportunities, particularly in the rising emerging market economies, at a far higher level than in earlier decades.The second phenomenon has been the change or transition of Russia and its neighboring nations from central planning to market-oriented economies. Nevertheless, these two phenomena were unexpectedly interrupted. All of us know that in August 1998, Russia underwent a major domestic financial crisis. However, in a series of events that started in middle of the year 1997, the global economy has experienced the greatest risk to its stability and security in the past half-century.
Following a long period of impressive growth, crisis hit a number of the countries in Asia that had displayed the strongest growth, and then, it endangered other countries throughout the world, not just the emerging markets in other regions like Latin America, but even the financial markets of the industrial nations. The two economic crises—one global, the other national—are not unconnected. Russia's chaos was a factor to the harshness of the global crisis, and consecutively has been worsened by several of the effects of that similar crisis.Among the forces that played a part in Russia's financial crisis in August 1998 were policy shortcomings and domestic economic imbalances—an internal factor to the crisis.
However, there was an external factor as well, that revealed the worsening international circumstances of the time, particularly declining commodity and oil prices, a threat to which Russia, because of its still extreme dependence on energy products for its exports, was especially vulnerable. Constitutional provision for a powerful presidency and a weak legislatureAccording to Ross (2004), the presidency has been fundamental to talks of democratic decline in Russia, as it has been fundamental to debates regarding partial democracy globally. Presidentialism is potentially corrosive to democracy for the reason that it is anti-consensual; aids patronage politics; identifies or names the presidents, their partisans with the national interest and their policies; converts politics into a zero-sum game; undermines restraints on executive power; and establishes a contest between executives and legislatures over who is sovereign within the state.Ross (2004) said that the Russian presidency has been portrayed as corroborating the worst hypotheses regarding presidentialism’s negative function in democratization. As maintained by Fish (2005), the anemia of Russian democracy can in fact be justified solely in terms of a single institutional choice and a few attendant policy alternatives.
Not like other examples of ‘bad presidentialism’, the negative effects of presidentialism are not the outcome of the particular constitutional form that the Russian presidency has assumed.Despite the fact that the powers of the president were expanded by the 1993 constitution, the presidency had negative consequences before the new constitution was implemented and the Russian polity did not transform as a constitutional type post-1993. Since the establishment of the presidency in the year 1981, the country has been an example of semi presidentialism, or a ‘president-parliamentary’ polity. The damaging effects of the Russian presidency are normally regarded as consequence of ‘superpresidentialism’, instead of its legal form (Fish, 2000).McFaul (2001) argues that the implementation of the 1993 constitution indicates the beginning of superpresidentialism. For McFaul (2001), superpresidentialism is not characterized by the constitutional powers of the presidential institution, even though these advocated and supported it in the long term.
In its place, superpresidentialism’s feature is the supremacy of personal rule over impersonal institutionalized management and the existence of a huge presidential apparatus, which controls the legislature and the state bureaucracy.After the year 1993, the increased formal powers for the presidency did not either increase or lessen the quality of democracy in Russia. Fish (2005) maintained that the new constitutional powers of the presidency could be considered to have steadied the polity for the reason that they settled some of the uncertainties that existed in the relationship between president and parliament, and which caused the October 1993 crisis in Russia.Nevertheless, they attained this effect at the expense of parliament being incapable to expand as a representative institution, one that could put certain checks on the executive and direct usual and prevalent matters into the policy process. Conclusion The means or manner in which Russia has failed to secure democracy and its future possibility to maintain a democratic polity are directly connected. In the case of Russia, failure in the field of state-building is tantamount to failure to democratize, given that privatized state power is contrary to democratic government and citizenship.
Hence, it can be said that Russia has not firmed up democracy and has a weak state. Nonetheless, a lot of people in Russia believe that prospects of larger political crises and change are small. They also think that the possibility of leadership change is small. In fact, during the end of the Yeltsin period, there was assumption that Yeltsin’s successor would govern in the same manner as he had due to deals concluded over the economy and federal power. To sum up, the works of Fish, McFaul, and Ross discussed and analyzed political system in Russia and its link to the failure of democratization of the country.Moreover, all of them have attempted to ascertain how Russia has failed to obtain the preconditions for future democratic governance like an institutionalized market economy, a state with certain capability to act because of national unity and public interest.
These authors agree that major institutions and political actors have debased and undermined democratic governance. In the process, all of the reasons stated in this paper have compromised the future consolidation of democracy by means of weakening both national and state for short-term ends.Thus, it can be said that the political system, actors, and institutions in Russia played a great part in the degradation and failure of democracy and its preconditions. Hence, as Fish (2005) said, Russia failed to achieve democratization because of its lagging economic reform, curse of resource wealth, the constitutional provision for a powerful presidency and a weakened legislature. Certainly, it can also be said that another culprit is the Russian presidency.
Lastly, the political system of Russia contributed a lot to the failure of the country’s democratization.
