United Russia (UR), the current ruling party, has been a key instrument in turning Russia’s emerging multiparty democracy in the 1990s into a virtual one-party system. The party has facilitated the extension of Vladimir Putin’s rule throughout the country and helped to bring regional leaders and their political machines under his control—at least for the limited purposes of passing desired legislation and assisting in achieving electoral victories for Putin and the party. Since the mid-2000s, United Russia has enjoyed a strong majority in the State Duma and in virtually every regional legislature; it occupies the political space so completely that opposition political activity is effectively precluded. Elite defection from Putin’s system remains rare.
In The Origins of Dominant Parties, Ora John Reuter examines how this came to pass and seeks a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon that would permit comparisons with other autocratic political systems. Data sources include the author’s many interviews with legislators and party officials in 10 Russian regions plus Moscow, scholarly literature and journalistic reports on the party’s role in Russian politics, and the author’s own extensive database of regional and federal political elites.
Reuter provides a nuanced examination of the role played by dominant parties in authoritarian systems generally. One question he seeks to answer is why dominant parties appear in some autocratic regimes—by his count, about half of those that have existed since 1946—but not in others. His answer draws on the concept of a “credible commitment” between leader and elites. Why would leaders burden themselves with an institution that could weaken their ability to control policy and personnel? What do elites have to gain by joining the dominant party if it comes at the expense of their own influence and autonomy? Leaders benefit from the stability that a party can offer through harnessing regional and local power centers. Reuter argues that elites benefit from opportunities for promotion and by gaining a share of the “spoils.” The two sides to the deal make this exchange “credible” by institutionalizing a structure, the dominant party, which guarantees that both sides get what they expect from the arrangement.
If either leaders or elites are too strong relative to each other, no deal is usually possible. When the political resources of each become more balanced, there is a potential for mutually beneficial compromise. In Reuter’s words, “dominant parties emerge when elites hold enough independent political resources that leaders need to coopt them, but not so many autonomous resources that they themselves are reluctant to commit themselves to cooperation by investing in a dominant party” (p. 23). In Chapter 8, the author specifies and tests a model based on this relationship for autocratic political systems. Using data on 128 dominant parties, he applies a measure of elite resources to show that these parties tend to emerge when elites are neither powerful nor weak compared to leaders.
Dominant parties’ power in authoritarian systems varies widely, from ineffectual to influential, with Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at its height being the paradigmatic instance of a powerful dominant party. Reuter finds United Russia to be in the middle to upper range of influence compared to other such parties. Putin explicitly resisted a more expansive role for the party. Russian state officials, both at the national and regional levels, are not under UR control and typically are not even party members. Even in its legislative activity, the party remains subordinate to executive authority, and the country’s top leadership—chiefly through the Kremlin’s Department for Internal Politics—closely monitors and intervenes in party decision making.
The history of attempts to create a “party of power” in post-Soviet Russia is analyzed in Chapters 3 and 4, and Reuter provides a perceptive account of the precursors to United Russia and its subsequent rise in the 2000s. He finds that the failure to form a dominant party was due to the superior position of regional elites. They were unwilling to subordinate themselves and their political machines to a Moscow-based political party because the center was incapable of making it worth their while. This was partly because Boris Yeltsin did not even try, due to his hostility to political parties generally, and partly because the center was financially strapped due to low oil prices in the 1990s. Rising oil prices, economic growth, and the emergence in 1999 of a new, popular president, Vladimir Putin, changed everything, and the conditions were ripe for the rise of United Russia.
Reuter makes a convincing case for the role of UR in managing the details of legislative activity and co-opting important regional elites into the party, such as businesspeople. The benefits that accrue to legislators are real: Lobbying by UR legislators is a lucrative activity, both at the national and regional level, and it is sufficient to motivate many elites to join the party. Careers in legislative bodies and the party organization itself provide additional incentives.
Yet Reuter’s focus on United Russia, one of the most visible political institutions, comes at the expense of other mechanisms that brought the heads of regions under central control in the 2000s. These other mechanisms, especially the actions of central government ministries and agencies in the regions, relied less on commitments and deal making than on raw power, both financial and administrative. When, for example, one examines the relative importance of executive and legislative power in distributing state contracts and other favors or largess (the “spoils”), the clear advantage goes to the executive. Government officials and governors are responsible for the overwhelming share of budgetary disbursements, and these are made without significant legislative involvement; UR-dominated legislatures are not the arenas where these decisions are made.
Russia’s regional governors and their decisions to join UR are the subject of Chapter 6. Almost all had joined the party by 2007. Reuter analyzes the date of joining as an indicator of acceptance of, or resistance to, the balance of benefits to costs on offer. In other words, he views governors’ decisions to join as a voluntary act and dichotomous—either in or out. In fact, powerful governors could negotiate deals that gave them effective control over local party organizations and legislators, thus keeping their political machines intact. Governors’ political machines depended on their ability to allocate financial resources, and they never relinquished this to UR (though the expansion of central government spending in the regions reduced their relative impact).
When viewed in the broader context of what was happening in Russian politics in the 2000s, credible commitments were less important in this process for many regional actors than credible coercion—firing or even imprisoning a governor who showed signs of disloyalty, auditing a businessman who financed an opposition party, or cutting funds to repair roads. The threats that mattered came not from UR and its central leadership but from the executive. Becoming a member of the ruling party in exchange for something tangible was clearly important for many political actors in the regions, but the Kremlin’s “offer he can’t refuse” played a major role in subordinating Russian governors to the center. Party membership was a symbolic recognition of the new context, but by itself it did not describe the relationship between the center and a region. Nevertheless, The Origin of Dominant Parties is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the rise of United Russia and its role in consolidating control over legislative activity.
