PROTECTING UNITED RUSSIA?

Moraski's article focuses on three of the party-system reforms that came into force in Putin's second term: the change from a mixed-member electoral system to one of proportional representation (PR), which eliminated the 225 single-member constituencies (SMC);Footnote ⁵ the raising of the PR electoral threshold from 5 to 7 per cent; and the introduction of an ‘imperative mandate’, according to which deputies lose their seats in the Duma if they voluntarily leave their parliamentary faction.

Moraski believes that these reforms ‘can be viewed as protecting United Russia from the centrifugal forces that could impede the preservation of such a party in subsequent elections’.Footnote ⁶ This argument is largely based on an analysis of the SMC half of the 2003 election, which suggests that many of the United Russia deputies elected from the constituencies were what Moraski calls ‘regional politicians’.Footnote ⁷ This, he continues, ‘poses problems for United Russia's party unity’ because ‘these deputies are more likely to possess stronger regional ties, which could lead them to prize regional interests over federal ones, particularly during times of crisis or uncertainty.’Footnote ⁸

There is little evidence, we should note, to support this line of reasoning. United Russia has never faced any significant discipline problems; on the contrary it has been highly loyal in its support of the executive. Moreover, there has never been any evidence of a troublesome ‘mandate divide’, whereby United Russia deputies elected from single-mandate constituencies have been notably less loyal than those elected from the PR list.Footnote ⁹ Moraski acknowledges this but argues that the reforms reflect, ‘prospective judgements on the part of the Kremlin about its ability to sustain a pro-presidential parliamentary majority over the long term’.Footnote ¹⁰ Moraski's specific concern is 2008, when Putin was constitutionally obliged to stand down as president. Given the party's reliance on Putin as a unifying force, his departure from office could result in splits within United Russia.Footnote ¹¹ Moraski believes that this could even result in United Russia's collapse: as he puts it, ‘without some additional incentives to maintain the party, United Russia's fate could resemble the fates of previous parties of power.’Footnote ¹²

Moraski believes that the shift to a solely PR system provides this incentive on the grounds that deputies elected from closed party lists are ‘more beholden’ to party leaders, who determine their place on the list, and are therefore less likely than SMC deputies to violate party discipline.Footnote ¹³ Or, in other words, ‘Under this electoral system, party members, regardless of how they were elected in 2003, have an incentive to toe the party line if they wish to increase their electoral prospects – that is, improve their position on the party list – in 2007.’Footnote ¹⁴

This argument, however, is factually inaccurate: United Russia's deputies simply are not any more beholden to party leaders under a closed-list PR system than they were under the mixed system.Footnote ¹⁵ Since the introduction of the 2001 law ‘On Political Parties’, decisions concerning nominations of candidates and lists of candidates for Duma elections have been the responsibility of party congress.Footnote ¹⁶ This means, given the highly centralized nature of United Russia, that the party leaders (or more accurately, the presidential administration) already had the power under the mixed electoral system to remove disloyal deputies from the party ticket altogether. The power to move disloyal deputies down a list is a vastly inferior sanction that obviously does not give the party hierarchy greater power over its deputies. By the same token, the possibility of being moved down a list does not provide a stronger incentive to deputies to ‘toe the party line’ than the far more significant threat of being denied nomination altogether. Nor would control over list placement help in the event that United Russia suffered serious splits and was in danger of breaking up (as previous parties of power have done), for deputies who are leaving the party have no reason to care about their position on its list. It is, then, unconvincing – to say the least – to argue that the PR system was introduced to render United Russia's constituency deputies ‘more beholden’ to the party's leaders, when the PR system does not, in fact, facilitate this.

Control over list placement is, though, an additional means (albeit lesser) for the party leadership to control its deputies. One would, however, need to adhere to a highly charitable (indeed naive) view of United Russia to believe that its leadership would prefer to move disloyal deputies down a list instead of removing them from the party ticket completely. Some evidence of how United Russia reacts to dissent emerged in 2004 when Anatolii Ermolin, a United Russia list deputy, sent an open letter to the Constitutional Court requesting that United Russia deputies be protected from pressure from the presidential administration. Ermolin described a meeting he and 15 other members of United Russia had attended with a ‘highly placed’ member of the presidential administration, who was unnamed but believed to be Viacheslav Surkov (deputy head of the administration).Footnote ¹⁷ This official, according to Ermolin, demanded unquestioning subordination to instructions from the presidential administration, reminding them that members of the administration had personally vouched for each of them.Footnote ¹⁸ The official told them that they were neither deputies nor the people's elected representatives but were ‘tied’ and did not have the right to vote according to their own judgement.Footnote ¹⁹ The official also pointed out to some of the deputies what the consequences (of disloyalty) could be for their industrialist friends, citing the Yukos affair as an example.Footnote ²⁰ Comments made by one of the deputies that several administration-backed bills contained clear mistakes, violated the Constitution and could damage the faction's reputation were met with ‘unprintable swearing, advice to “keep your opinion to yourself” and the order “vote as you are told” ’.Footnote ²¹ Ermolin, as a result of his complaint, was expelled from the United Russia faction and did not appear on the party's list in 2007.Footnote ²²

This episode is instructive in several ways. First of all, it shows that the Kremlin was perfectly able to enforce discipline in United Russia under the mixed electoral system, as this took place before the PR system was introduced. More generally, it vividly demonstrates the degree of control that the presidential administration has asserted over United Russia's deputies, the loyalty that is demanded and the ruthlessness with which disobedience is treated. United Russia, in short, is not the sort of party that responds to disloyalty with the slap on the wrist of a lower position on a list.Footnote ²³

A secondary argument advanced by Moraski is that eliminating the single-mandate constituencies inhibits ‘other parties from capitalizing on regional politicians in the same fashion as it [United Russia] had in 2003’.Footnote ²⁴ He points here to the experience of the People's Party, which won 17 single-mandate constituencies in 2003. According to Moraski, the People's Party's ability ‘to organize in Russia's regions and use the SMD [single-member districts] contests to win a higher percentage of parliamentary seats than its share of the national vote demonstrates the electoral opportunity that the SMD contests could have provided the Kremlin's rivals in 2007’.Footnote ²⁵ This argument is also unsound. The People's Party was, as Moraski recognizes, a pro-Kremlin party. Its performance, therefore, in winning 17 seats, given the realities of Russian politics, tells us absolutely nothing about opportunities for the Kremlin's rivals to win SMC seats. The Kremlin's grip on electoral politics is such that it is inconceivable that the People's Party would have won 17 seats if it had been an opposition party: even the Communist Party – by far the largest and most successful opposition party in Russia – won only 12 single-mandate constituencies in 2003. The idea, then, that the introduction of the PR system was prompted, in part, by the People's Party winning 17 single-mandate constituencies is implausible because this simply was not indicative of a potential threat to United Russia.

We can see then that neither case put forward by Moraski – that these party-system reforms were introduced to constrain United Russia's potentially disloyal SMC deputies and to obviate possible regionally based opposition from the SMCs – bears serious scrutiny. Moraski also does not explain how these explanations account for the higher PR threshold or the imperative mandate.

Moraski's analysis, moreover, rests on the supposition that these reforms were introduced in response to the 2003 Duma election. This is sheer speculation, for Moraski provides no evidence whatsoever that the Kremlin instigated this legislation in response to a perceived threat from potentially disloyal ‘regional politicians’ elected via SMCs in 2003 (nor have I seen any anywhere else). This argument implicitly assumes, moreover, that the party-system reforms passed after 2003 were introduced for completely different reasons to those reforms passed before 2003.Footnote ²⁶ This is intuitively unlikely and, as we shall see, an assumption that fatally impairs Moraski's analysis, for these legislative changes were effectively part of the same reform programme; as such, an understanding of the first-term legislation is crucial in explaining the second-term reforms. It is to the first-term reforms that we now turn. We proceed, however, by setting out the shortcomings of Russia's party system in the 1990s that, to a large extent, prompted these reforms.

THE FIRST-TERM PARTY-SYSTEM REFORMS

In the 1990s Russia's party system was far from consolidated. The reach of the parties, for one thing, was limited: no party representative occupied the post of president (by far the most powerful position in the political system); parties scarcely penetrated the upper house of Russia's bicameral legislature, the Federation Council; national political parties also played a very limited role in regional politics at both the executive and legislative levels.Footnote ²⁷ Parties did play a central role in the Duma in the 1990s, although even here the party system was nowhere near consolidated. Independent candidates were unusually successful, winning more single-mandate constituencies than any individual party at each of Russia's first three Duma elections. Even on the PR section of the Duma vote – the one area where parties were predominant – Russia's party system was fragmented and volatile. The number of parties contesting the PR vote was consistently high and there was also a high turnover of parties (both major and minor parties routinely appeared and disappeared between elections).Footnote ²⁸ Many of Russia's parties, moreover, could scarcely be classed as political parties as they often had little presence outside major cities; some, indeed, existed only on paper.

President Putin expressed his dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of this party system and called for legislation to improve it in his first ‘state of the nation’ address to the Federal Assembly in July 2000:

Putin returned to this theme at a press conference in July 2001 (shortly after he had signed the law ‘On Political Parties’) when he again voiced his distaste for the state of Russia's party system and made clear his desire to streamline it. He said:

These statements evince a clear desire to foster a more consolidated party system, similar to those found in established democracies, consisting of fewer, stronger parties that should have mass support and not just be ‘parties of power’. It is, however, dangerous to take politicians' rhetoric at face value, and this is certainly true of Vladimir Putin. Putin's administration, for instance, subsequently demonstrated no commitment to the development of parties that are not ‘parties of power’; indeed his administration put great effort into securing pre-eminence for United Russia, thereby bringing about precisely the opposite of what he called for.Footnote ³¹ The legislation that passed, though, was consistent in a number of key respects with the stated preference for a more streamlined, consolidated party system.

The first-term reforms, for instance, restricted the types of organization that could compete in elections. The 2001 law ‘On Political Parties’ established political parties as the only form of organization with the right to compete independently in elections at the federal and regional levels.Footnote ³² Other bodies, known as civic associations, could participate in elections (through 2003) but only – according to an amendment to the law ‘On the Election of Duma Deputies’– in electoral blocs that consisted of a maximum of three entities, one of which had to be a political party.Footnote ³³ An amendment passed in 2003 ruled that after the 2003 Duma election civic associations would not be allowed to participate in blocs (and, therefore, elections) at all.Footnote ³⁴

The law on parties, moreover, set out a number of criteria that must be met in order for an organization to register with the authorities and attain the legal status of a political party. Most notably in Putin's first term (it changed later, as we shall see) parties were required to have a minimum of 10,000 members, with no fewer than 100 members in regional branches in more than half of the subjects of the Russian Federation.Footnote ³⁵

These reforms were reinforced by the introduction of the mixed PR/majoritarian electoral system at the regional level. This institutional change assigned at least half of the seats in regional legislatures, which had previously been dominated by independents, to national political parties (or blocs containing parties), thereby establishing a party system in the regions where essentially there had not been one.Footnote ³⁶ Further, an amendment to the law ‘On the Election of Duma Deputies’, passed in 2002, established the higher 7 per cent PR threshold for Duma elections after 2003.Footnote ³⁷ There was also a financial element to this legislation. The law on parties introduced state funding (in proportion to the number of votes received) for any party winning at least 3 per cent of the vote or 12 single-mandate constituencies.Footnote ³⁸ An addition in 2002 to the law ‘On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights’, which came into force following the 2003 election, exempts parties that have won list seats in the Duma from the need to collect signatures or pay deposits when registering their candidates for election.Footnote ³⁹

Cumulatively these reforms restricted the type of organization that could compete in elections and made life more difficult for minor parties while offering perquisites to those major parties that succeeded on the PR list. These innovations are clearly in keeping with the Putin administration's stated aim of encouraging the development of a more consolidated party system.

These first-term reforms also furthered Putin's centralizing project, which was a major theme of his presidency from the outset.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed two of the main aims of the law ‘On Political Parties’, expressed explicitly by Aleksandr Veshniakov, then head of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), were to exclude parties of an authoritarian-nationalistic type and prevent the development of separatist tendencies through parties.Footnote ⁴¹ Article 9 of the law on parties clearly goes some way towards meeting these objectives as it prohibits the formation of parties on a racial, national or religious basis. The law's membership requirements, which compel parties to have a minimum membership in more than half of Russia's regions, also constitute a de facto ban on regional and inter-regional political parties. The introduction of the mixed electoral system in the regions is an additional check on centrifugal forces. Political parties, as we have already seen, were very weak in the regional legislatures, which were dominated by regional elites. The allocation of at least half of the seats in regional legislatures to national political parties clearly impairs the capacity of local elites to dominate regional assemblies.

THE SECOND-TERM REFORMS

Against this background of legislation aimed at systematizing the party system and centralizing the political system, the party-system reforms introduced in Putin's second term are nothing like as ‘puzzling’ as Moraksi repeatedly suggests. In fact, as we shall now see, the second-term reforms in many ways are a direct extension of those passed in the first term.

Vladimir Putin initiated a second wave of major reforms in his speech to the government (which was also attended by the regional governors) in September 2004, following the tragic events in Beslan.Footnote ⁴² Putin announced a package of reforms aimed, he claimed, at strengthening the state and national security. Two of these reforms affect the party system in Russia and both effect greater centralization of the party system.

The first of these was Putin's insistence that regional governors should no longer be directly elected but be appointed by the president (subject to approval by the regional legislature). The bill that was subsequently passed by the Duma effectively awarded Putin the right to appoint Russia's governors.Footnote ⁴³ It is hard to see how this makes the slightest difference to security, which was Putin's ostensible main concern throughout his speech. This does, however, considerably advance Putin's centralizing agenda because it renders Russia's governors dependent upon the president's patronage for their positions.

This has important implications for political parties, especially United Russia. Governors wield considerable power in their regions and as such are a significant electoral asset for any party. The executive's power of appointment is a very strong incentive for governors to align themselves with United Russia and, conversely, makes it extremely difficult for governors to oppose United Russia without being removed from office. The importance of the governors to United Russia is reflected in the party's tactic of placing governors (and other regional notables such as mayors) in prominent positions on the party's regional lists.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such candidates, the vast majority of whom do not take up the seats in the Duma to which they are entitled, are known as ‘locomotives’ (parovozy) because it is their job to drive United Russia to election victory. The power to appoint governors thus gives the executive real leverage over the most powerful regional actors in Russia and in so doing helps preserve the unity and electoral dominance of United Russia.Footnote ⁴⁵

Putin also proposed the change to a solely PR electoral system in this speech, saying:

The introduction of a PR system, of course, does nothing to improve national security. Nor did this reform appear to be a crude attempt to consolidate United Russia's position in the Duma. Aleksandr Veshniakov calculated that if the 2003 elections had been held on the basis of party lists United Russia would have received 239 seats.Footnote ⁴⁷ Under the mixed system United Russia won 223 seats. The United Russia faction, however, was very successful at co-opting those elected via SMCs (independents and representatives of small parties), and its membership in the Duma from 2004 to 2007 generally numbered over 300. The introduction of a solely PR system does not, therefore, directly advance United Russia's electoral interests because it requires the party of power to win a much higher proportion of the vote to maintain this number of seats in the Duma.Footnote ⁴⁸

The introduction of PR does, however, fully accord with President Putin's centralizing project, as it further reduces the ability of regional interests to influence federal politics by denying them direct entry into the legislature. Putin, in effect, admitted this at a Kremlin press conference in December 2004 when he said that:

The second-term reforms also serve to consolidate the party system in a number of ways. This legislation, as in the first term, restricts the entities that can compete in Duma elections. The introduction of the PR system, for instance, eliminates independent (i.e. non-party) candidates. A change made to the law ‘On the Election of Duma Deputies’ removed the opportunity for parties to compete in elections in blocs, even with other parties. Together these innovations meant that (commencing in 2007) only individual political parties could contest elections. These new rules, moreover, effectively exclude minor parties, those that have no chance of crossing the 7 per cent threshold individually, from the Duma.

An amendment to the law ‘On Political Parties’ passed in 2004 raised the membership demands made of parties fivefold. Consequently, since January 2006 parties have required a total of 50,000 members with at least 500 members in more than half of Russia's regions and no fewer than 250 in other branches.Footnote ⁵⁰ This clearly makes it much harder for smaller organizations to attain (or maintain) the status of ‘political party’; indeed only 19 of the 35 parties registered with the Federal Registration Service met this stipulation when it came into effect, the other 16 were deregistered.Footnote ⁵¹

Further revisions to the law ‘On the Election of Duma Deputies’ also make it more difficult to register for parliamentary elections. Parties without list seats in the Duma must either collect 200,000 signatures across the country or pay a registration deposit: these changes significantly increase the registration deposit and dramatically reduce the permissible percentage of invalid signatures.Footnote ⁵² As parties with factions in the Duma are exempt from these requirements, these higher registration requirements increase the established parties' comparative advantage over their competitors. Another second-term amendment that instigated a tenfold increase in state funding similarly benefits larger parties.Footnote ⁵³

The ‘imperative mandate’ rule (which was passed by the Duma in 2005 and came into force after the 2007 election) establishes that any deputies who voluntarily leave their factions now lose their seats in the Duma.Footnote ⁵⁴ This, by definition, stamps out floor-crossing, thereby further consolidating the party system within the Duma.

EXPLAINING THE REFORMS

The preceding analysis shows that an unambiguous concern with centralization and party-system consolidation runs right through the Putin-era party-system reforms. The second-term legislation, therefore, was not a response to the 2003 election results (as Moraski claims) but rather a continuation of pre-existing policies. Nor is it surprising that Putin's administration should wish to pursue these aims. Centralization, for instance, has been a central theme of Putin's presidency and this legislation, as we have seen, contributes to it in several ways. Putin also demonstrated, in word and deed, a clear desire to foster a consolidated party system similar to those found in established democracies. A more systematized party system was probably an end in itself, given Putin's proclivity for order. The construction of a party system more like those in, as Putin put it, ‘developed, civilized countries’ is also an important part of Putin's endeavour to sell Russia, at home and abroad, as a democracy. Putin has repeatedly declared a personal commitment to the maintenance of democracy in Russia (in the face of a wealth of empirical evidence to the contrary).Footnote ⁵⁵

It is common in international practice for semi-authoritarian regimes to maintain a formal commitment to democracy for reasons of legitimacy. As Larry Diamond points out:

Putin's party-system reforms clearly contribute to such an agenda. This legislation has significantly reduced the total number of parties and those that remain have sizeable nationwide memberships. Following the 2007 Duma election all of the seats in the Duma are held by political parties for the first time in post-Soviet history, as there are no independent deputies or blocs. Parties also play some role in regional politics, as they do in the West. This can even be said of party finance: Russia now has state funding of parties, as do many western democracies, and their financial affairs are regulated (formally, at least).

Russia's party system certainly looks more like those in established democracies than it did when Putin came to power. The resemblance, though, is entirely superficial for in essence the party system is farther from democratic norms than ever before. This party system is, to a significant degree, the product of Kremlin manipulation of party politics, particularly elections. Duma elections under Putin have been characterised by extensive use of what Andreas Schedler calls ‘the menu of manipulation’, that is by highly biased media coverage, misuse of administrative resources on a massive scale, irregularities concerning vote counting (including blatant falsification in some areas) and harassment of the opposition.Footnote ⁵⁷ All of this has been used to bolster parties backed (and even formed) by the Kremlin and to undermine opposition parties. The outcome is a rubber-stamp parliament that constitutes a lesser check on the executive than its equivalent in the late-perestroika era. United Russia, by far the largest party at present with 315 of the parliament's 450 seats, was unswervingly loyal to Putin throughout his two terms as president. United Russia now appears to be subservient both to Putin, who is now prime minister, and the new president, Dmitrii Medvedv.Footnote ⁵⁸ A Just Russia, which won 38 seats, is also a pro-Kremlin party: it is openly supportive of Putin and even co-nominated the presidential candidacy of his chosen successor, Medvedev. The LDPR has 40 seats but, in spite of the fiery rhetoric of its leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii, is also consistently loyal to the executive. Only the CPRF, which holds a numerically insignificant 57 seats, will provide constant opposition to the executive. We should not be fooled, then, by this attempt to mimic a western-style party system, for in reality it is a façade intended to provide democratic cover for significantly undemocratic governance.

DEMOCRACY IN THE LONG RUN?

During Putin's presidency the party system in Russia clearly did not develop in a way that is favourable to democracy. Moraski's wider argument, however, is that the legislative changes he discusses could have democratizing effects in the long run. As such, Russia is an example of how regimes in the ‘grey zone’– while seeking to advance their authoritarian interests in the short term – may inadvertently advance democracy in the long term. Here Moraski raises an important general point, which is relevant to Russia and of interest comparatively. The Putin-era party-system reforms were passed to further the regime's non-democratic interests yet they could have long-term democratic effects. However, Moraski's specific arguments concerning both these interests and the potential effects are erroneous.

Concerning the regime's interests, Moraski's central argument is that, ‘electoral reforms that favour democracy in the long run may be needed to establish a dominant party in the short term.’Footnote ⁵⁹ As we have already seen, Moraski's arguments that these reforms were intended to establish a dominant party are unconvincing. Nor were these reforms needed in this regard: United Russia was already dominant with a loyal two-thirds majority at its command in the Duma following the 2003 Duma election. An alternative motivation proposed by Moraski is that, ‘authoritarian incumbents could institute reforms that might promote democracy in the long term because these same reforms advance their own interests of undermining electoral competition in the short run.’Footnote ⁶⁰ It is, however, doubtful that the reforms Moraski discusses undermine electoral competition in United Russia's interests. The reforms certainly restrict competition in some ways but they do not advantage United Russia more than any other party that is capable of crossing the 7 per cent threshold, including the main opposition party, the CPRF.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, the move to the PR system made it harder for United Russia to maintain its two-thirds majority in the Duma.

Moraski's discussion of the long-term democratic benefits of these reforms is also deficient. The move to a PR system, for instance, ‘should be good for Russian democracy’ because proportional systems ‘grant smaller parties representing specific societal interests a better chance of attaining seats in parliament’ and ‘enhance the feeling among ethnic or societal minorities that they have legitimate and substantial access to the political process’.Footnote ⁶² It will be recalled, though, that this legislation introduces a 7 per cent barrier, which makes it impossible for smaller parties to attain seats in parliament. The law ‘On Political Parties’, moreover, only permits the formation of national parties and explicitly prohibits the registration of parties on racial, national or religious bases. It is, then, nonsensical to claim that the introduction of PR in Russia can improve the representation of smaller parties and ethnic and social minorities when the legislation under discussion explicitly rules this out.

Moraski's second point here is that these reforms could result in stronger opposition parties in the years to come. This is a very important observation but the statement that ‘a shift to solely party-list PR from a mixed-member system […] can yield a more organized opposition as easily as it can fortify the position of the ruling party’ is an extraordinary misjudgement because it completely disregards Kremlin manipulation of the party system.Footnote ⁶³

Under Putin, party-system development was a two-pronged process. On the one hand, institutional reforms served to centralize the political system and systematize the party system. Parallel to this, on the other hand, there was extensive electoral manipulation, which actually drove party-system development in practice by securing favourable results for the Kremlin. It is important to note that electoral outcomes under Putin were the outcome of a complex of many factors (such as the benefits that United Russia gained from its close association with a highly popular president), not just electoral manipulation. It would, however, be implausible to suggest that the regime's machinations did not have a telling impact. For instance, it is simply inconceivable that United Russia would have won 64.3 per cent of the vote in 2007 had the election been free and fair. Nor it is a coincidence that no opposition party has recorded what can be considered a successful result in a parliamentary election since 1999. When the Kremlin exercises this degree of control over electoral outcomes it is utterly fallacious to claim, as Moraski does, that the move to a PR system can yield a more organized opposition as easily as it can fortify the position of the ruling party.Footnote ⁶⁴

There is no denying, however, that these reforms have laid the institutional basis for stronger parties and a more consolidated party system. Parties now have nationwide memberships, they are also the sole participants in Duma elections and must win 7 per cent of the vote to enter parliament. There will be no return to the proliferation of minor parties and independent candidates that characterized the volatile and fragmented party system of the 1990s. There is also no doubt that stronger opposition parties could act as a democratizing influence; not least, they could mobilize popular and elite opposition to undemocratic elections. At the same time, such parties cannot emerge when the Kremlin is able, to a large extent, to determine the winners and losers of Duma elections. In fact, a major fear has to be that United Russia's dominance – achieved via unfair political competition – could persist for decades, as in the case of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in a system where other parties serve only to legitimate (not challenge) its grip on power.Footnote ⁶⁵

However, if the practices of electoral manipulation lessen or fail, the party-system reforms enacted under Putin could become highly significant. While there is little hope of this at present (on either count), events elsewhere in the former Soviet Union suggest that it is difficult to manage electoral outcomes indefinitely, even in states that are significantly more authoritarian than Russia. If, for whatever reason, there is a backlash – either in the polling booth or on the street – against the authorities in Russia, as there has been in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, Putin's party-system reforms could serve as the basis for stronger opposition parties in the Duma capable of providing a greater check on the executive.

CONCLUSION

The Putin-era party-system legislation is an instance of an authoritarian regime introducing reforms intended to advance its own immediate interests, which could inadvertently further democracy in the longer term (although not in the ways Moraski proposes). Specifically, reforms that were introduced to further and mask authoritarian rule in Russia (by centralizing and consolidating the party system) could have democratizing effects if electoral manipulation becomes less effective. When regimes in the ‘grey zone’ strengthen institutions such as political parties, even for authoritarian reasons, it is possible that they are laying part of the institutional ground for future democracy; elements of façade democracy, in other words, could become genuinely democratic. It must be emphasized that the reforms in Russia have yielded no such democratic benefits thus far. It would though be highly ironic if Vladimir Putin, who has striven (at the expense of democracy) to increase the power of the presidency relative to political parties and the Duma (and indeed every other institution in the political system), turns out to have established the institutional framework that helps to strengthen parties, weaken the presidency and foment democracy in Russia in the long run.