British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Derek S. Hutcheson

Is Russia a Democracy?

The number of countries which could nominally be termed as 'democracies' increased exponentially in the last quarter of the twentieth century. However, the extent to which a country can be termed 'democratic' depends not only on its institutions but also on the extent to which freedom of expression, equality before the law and the development of civil society allow elections to be genuine expressions of society’s will. The present paper will examine the 'quality of democracy’ in the Russian Federation, which, as the largest country in the world and a former superpower, is of particular interest in the current wave of transition. Although Russia features regular, multi-candidate elections, there are several grounds for suggesting that it is far from the liberal democratic ‘ideal type’. Survey evidence indicates that Russian citizens consider themselves to have less influence over politics than under one-party communist rule in Soviet times. There is evidence of increasing disengagement from the political process (turnout has fallen in every major federal election since the mid-1990s), and civil society remains weak. Increasing centralisation and inconsistent application of the rule of law have also been noted. The 2003-04 elections gave the clearest demonstration yet of the power of 'administrative resources' in Russia, and arguably showed that the political system is moving ever further from the realms of societal expression towards a more elite-based process encompassing state officials, professional political consultants, and the state media.

Dr Derek S. Hutcheson has been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, since January 2003. Prior to this he held an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the same department. His research focuses on the 'quality of democracy' in post-communist Europe, particularly Russia and Eastern Germany. He is the author of Political Parties in the Russian Regions (London/New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), and the editor with Elena A. Korosteleva of The Quality of Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Routledge, 2005)