Introduction
This article explores the way in which internationally promoted norms of good governance, which involve expanding citizen participation in local policy processes, are put into practice by local governments in two non-democratic states: Russia and China. It identifies a set of practices, enacted by local officials through multiplying government-sanctioned participatory mechanisms at municipal, district, and street levels, which, on the one hand, enable citizens to engage directly with local officials in policy processes, but limit and undermine civic participation, on the other. I term this set of practices ‘participatory authoritarianism’. While my empirical focus considers the emergence of discourses of active citizenship and the legislative development of new government-organised participatory mechanisms in post-Soviet Russia and post-reform China, I hope to make two broader contributions to the study of authoritarian governance. First, I bring two hitherto discrete bodies of literature into conversation with one another, namely those on local governance by Russia specialists and those by China specialists, trace common trends in citizen participation and thereby draw out conclusions that apply in both cases. Second, I show how globally promoted, ostensibly democratic discourses and practices, such as participatory governance, are employed in order to maintain domestic non-democratic rule.Footnote 1
While both pre-reform China and Soviet-era Russia operated elaborate procedures for garnering citizens’ views on local policy issues, the adoption of market-oriented reforms in both states has facilitated the proliferation of new types of local government-approved participatory mechanisms that envisage a more active and autonomous role for citizens in local governance.Footnote 2 However, this engagement occurs in an environment where more independent channels of participation are curtailed and regime-level democratisation is absent. In Russia, the space for electoral participation has narrowed following Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, and scholars increasingly classify the regime as ‘authoritarian’, rather than ‘hybrid’.Footnote 3 In China, while national elections have never occurred, analysts note increasingly repressive domestic governance under Xi Jinping.Footnote 4 In what follows, I consider how these two non-democratic states recontextualise global trends towards greater participatory governance, arguing that the combination of a lack of independent feedback channels with a fragmenting and privatising state sector and increasingly educated, politically aware, middle-class citizenries means that non-democratic states must develop innovations that address the resultant knowledge gap in policymaking processes while managing and directing heightened civic energy.
The literature on nominally democratic institutions in non-democratic settings can be broadly divided into two camps: one that suggests such institutions have negligible democratising effects on the overall character of authoritarian regimesFootnote 5 and one that suggests that their impact requires us to reclassify regimes as ‘hybrid’.Footnote 6 However, the bulk of both strands focus on national-level institutions and processes – parliaments, legislatures, and elections. Research on participatory institutions at the local level less explicitly engage with questions of regime type, but their conclusions tend to confirm the first view: local participatory mechanisms contribute to national regime stability by enabling governments to access citizens’ views on local issues, vital for effective policymaking (and hence for minimising discontent),Footnote 7 and channelling growing middle-class political consciousness into approved, non-threatening fora, reducing the risk of unmanageable civic activism.Footnote 8 They also enable governments to demonstrate adherence to globally promoted trends of civic engagement and good governance, challenging accusations of authoritarian rule from both domestic and international critics. Thus, the existence of participatory mechanisms should not be taken as prima facie evidence that an authoritarian regime is shifting towards hybridity or democracy and explains why non-democratic leaders are keen to promote local civic participation. While the research presented below supports these conclusions, the present article is less concerned with exploring the effects of local institutions on national regime type, and more with tracing the ways in which non-democratic leaders promote and manage the new forms of active citizenship produced through state transformation. Below, I seek to demonstrate the shift in relationship between government and citizen in authoritarian-regulatory states with evidence from state discourse, legislation, and interview data.
Scholars of China have long noted local participatory developments within broader authoritarian conditions, and have produced numerous useful conceptualisations.Footnote 9 These include ‘populist authoritarianism’, which captures the combination of high support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with high levels of political protest;Footnote 10 ‘authoritarian deliberation’, which conceptualises the proliferation of consultative mechanisms in China's non-democratic polity;Footnote 11 ‘consultative authoritarianism’, which explores China's increasingly active yet controlled civil society groups;Footnote 12 and ‘authoritarian responsiveness’, which considers whether state officials implement societal demands.Footnote 13 Why has there been a dearth of attempts to conceptualise this development in the case of Russia? Many scholars of Russian politics appeared blinkered by the legacy of the transition paradigm, which assumed that countries emerging from the USSR were set upon an inevitable trajectory of democratisation.Footnote 14 Hence, studies tended to focus on whether the institutions of liberal democracy such as civil society are shifting towards consolidation or co-optation,Footnote 15 which, while certainly worthy of scholarly endeavour, has obscured the emergence of other institutional innovations not captured by a democratisation framework.Footnote 16 While some studies of China adopted the transition framework, they are far fewer than in the Russian case.
The present article aims to redress this imbalance by developing a concept and small typology of associated practices of managing growing levels of civic participation in local governance, which appear in both states – and perhaps beyond. Hence, I choose the broader term ‘participatory’, which captures the range of modes of citizen engagement from consultation and deliberation to delegation and co-production.Footnote 17 While the China scholars discussed above have researched participation as a strategy of domestic regime survival, I highlight the significance of global trends in bringing about, shaping, and mediating these strategies and their intertwining with local non-democratic traditions of government. Current literature has tended to assume that democratic norms promoted by international actors have a democratising influence on domestic regimes; I argue that the opposite is often the case.Footnote 18 In Russia and China, practices of managed participation constitute local, non-democratic manifestations of global good governance trends.
The comparative study of political processes in Russia and China is a small but growing field.Footnote 19 I seek to contribute to this field from an interpretive perspective, which departs from traditional approaches based on ‘controlled comparison’ that involve ‘either contrasting outcomes despite similar potentially explanatory characteristics or similar outcomes despite contrasting potentially explanatory characteristics’.Footnote 20 As Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith have argued, such an approach can over emphasise the ability to control in comparative research designs in the social sciences and de-emphasise context and the importance of local meanings in the construction of the political.Footnote 21 Instead, I follow the approach to comparison that Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers have termed ‘parallel demonstration of theory’. Here, ‘the point of the comparison is to assert a similarity among the cases – similarity, that is, in terms of the common applicability of the overall theoretical arguments’.Footnote 22 For such an approach to be convincing and rigorous – and to avoid accusations of cherry picking facts – in-depth knowledge of each case must be acquired, and comparison must start from ‘the [researcher's] ability to make sense of the singularities of each system, rather than from the capacity either to slot them into predetermined boxes or place them on a continuum’.Footnote 23 An interpretively oriented parallel demonstration of theory should seek to uncover locally situated meanings from which similarities across both cases can be highlighted and interpreted through the proposed theoretical framework.
From this perspective, Russia and China are pertinent comparative cases for a theoretical elaboration of the relationship between bureaucratic transformation and citizen participation as they share two important similarities. First, both developed extensive state socialist bureaucracies, meaning that the introduction of market principles required a transformation of the relationship between citizens and government, from one based on universal entitlement to one based on individual need. This suggests that both governments’ domestic rhetoric are likely to share the goal of legitimating this transformation. Second, both states are largely non-democratic at the national level (with no opportunities to elect leaders in China and limited opportunities in Russia) and freedoms of assembly and expression are curtailed. While my analysis seeks to maintain an appreciation of the unique political culture of each state – indeed, citizens’ experience of social control by the state in Russia and China differ enormously and is discussed below – my proposition or, following John Boswell and colleagues, my ‘plausible conjecture’, is that the common governance problems inherent in the process of bureaucratic transformation of non-democratic states are also inspiring local solutions with similarities.Footnote 24 These solutions seek to recruit citizens into the governing process but simultaneously limit and undermine their impact. In order to demonstrate this, I produce a small typology of practices that appear in both cases, which constitute participatory authoritarianism. The typology consists of, first, extending participatory opportunities while restricting who can participate and, second, engaging citizens in decision-making processes but undermining or distorting their input. This helps us understand how local non-democratic leaders manage citizens’ involvement in local political processes as authoritarian government shifts towards governance.
Comparative interpretive analysis is relatively rare, partly because of the difficulties in developing sufficient levels of ethnographic sensibility in more than one highly complex polity.Footnote 25 I have sought to address this by spending more than two years living, working, and conducting fieldwork in each country. Hence, the present article is based over one hundred research interviews conducted during this time with local scholars, current and former members of local participatory bodies, as well as local officials in Russia and China. In Russia, my fieldwork has focused on corporate deliberative and advisory bodies developed since 2005, such as public chambers (obchestvennye palaty) and public councils (obshchestvennye sovety), and, more recently, participatory budgeting initiatives (initsiativnoye byudzhetirovaniye).Footnote 26 In China, my fieldwork has explored residents’ committees (juweihui), civic organisations aimed at enhancing participatory governance, and participatory budgeting initiatives (canyu shi yusuan). In both countries, I have conducted formal interviews and informal conversations with scholars working on participatory governance. While I do not cite all interviews in the present text, they inform my broader analysis and overall argumentation.
This ethnographic orientation is supported by critical discourse analysis (CDA) of texts and speeches by political leaders, as well as relevant legal documents. On the Russian side, I accessed ten annual Presidential Addresses to the Federal Assembly between 2008 and 2019, and Vladimir Putin's seven pre-election articles outlining his domestic and foreign policy agendas prior to the March 2012 Presidential elections. The Presidential Address has been made annually since the adoption of the 1993 Constitution and is considered to deal with the ‘state of the nation’; the pre-election articles were published in some of the country's most respected broadsheets and were discussed extensively both in Russia and beyond. On the Chinese side, I accessed the programmatic speeches by Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and, latterly, Xi Jinping, to the five-yearly National Party Congress (2002, 2007, 2013, and 2017), and two collections of Xi Jinping's writings that now form Xi Jinping Thought.Footnote 27 In the article's second section, I examine how each leader constructs processes of change, how they describe the role of the citizen in governance and the institutions envisaged to inculcate this new role, and the legitimating narratives for the new relationship between citizens and the authorities. CDA complements my practice-based understanding of governance by emphasising the dialectical relationship between discursive change and the evolution of practices, and highlights how various types of practices may fuse together over time, as discourses are weaved together by political leaders to form legitimating narratives for these new practices.Footnote 28 I suggest this is what has occurred with democratic practices of participation and authoritarian practices of control in the field of local governance in Russia and China.
The article comprises three sections. First, I set out the theoretical foundations of ‘participatory authoritarianism’ and delineate the typology of its constitutive practices. I suggest that the oppositional yet mutually reinforcing logics of openness and control found in these practices are essential for local governance in an era of late capitalism. Second, I explore Russian and Chinese governmental rhetoric on civic participation, arguing that the market transformation of state bureaucracy without the political transformation of government has required leaders to produce new vocabularies and narratives for the proliferating mechanisms of participatory governance in both states. Third, I trace the twin logics producing participatory authoritarianism in the legislation on local self-government in Russia and China, and illustrate the typology of practices set out in the first section with evidence from my interviews. While some of these discussions may be familiar to scholars with expertise in one of the two countries, the article's innovation lies in two areas. First, it draws these conclusions across both cases, demonstrating that the arketization of bureaucracies presents a set of common challenges for non-democratic leaders that are being addressed through a common set of practices. And, second, it demonstrates how international norms of ‘good governance’ can be applied locally for quite different ends.
Practices of participatory authoritarianism in the era of late capitalism
This section builds on the nascent body of work that takes a practice-based approach to the study of authoritarianism.Footnote 29 Theodore Schatzki defines a practice as ‘a set of doings and sayings organized by a pool of understandings, a set of rules’.Footnote 30 Exploring practices of governance enables the researcher to explore the formation of political subjecthood through language, signs, and discourse, accessing this subject through the ‘sets of patterned actions’ he/she engages in.Footnote 31 When applied to authoritarianism, it shifts the focus away from national regime type by suggesting that authoritarian practices exist within liberal democracies – and, by extension, that democratic practices may exist in one-party states – and aids an understanding of how various ‘patterns of action’ reinforce or undermine political stability.
Marlies Glasius argues that ‘authoritarian practices presuppose a downward relationship, where the political actor engaged in them has control over the people affected’.Footnote 32 While the practices discussed below do presuppose such a relationship, they simultaneously presume an inclusive, pluralistic relationship. I seek to capture this Janus-faced nature of local governance in Russia and China by defining participatory authoritarianism as a set of practices by local governments in non-democratic states undergoing processes of bureaucratic marketisation that establishes avenues for citizens to engage voluntarily in policy processes, while simultaneously deliberately limiting, controlling, or undermining the extent and impact of this engagement. These practices occur at the level of process and at the level of outcome and hence take two forms: first, widening citizens’ participation in policy processes, while either vetting potential participants to ensure access only to compliant individuals or ejecting participants during the event for airing inappropriate opinions; and second, conducting a participatory event, but de-emphasising its results by privately making the relevant decisions beforehand or drastically watering down any transformative potential in the follow-up legislation. These two practices, illustrated in the third section, occur in an institutional setting (what Schatzki termed ‘pool of understandings’) in which civic participation is simultaneously encouraged and promoted – often as a panacea for the state's many problems – but, rather than inviting citizens to help shape the agenda, conceives their role primarily as assisting local authorities in the execution of centrally determined tasks.
Participatory practices have existed in authoritarian states long before the implementation of market reforms. In China, the Maoist concept of the ‘mass line’, which refers to ‘a close and direct relationship between the Party and the masses’, enables citizens to interact with local officials who are obliged to respond to complaints and resolve disputes in a timely fashion.Footnote 33 Mass line ideology has been invoked by scholars to interpret China's participatory mechanisms since Mao, which range from evaluating draft legislation and writing letters to officialsFootnote 34 to the high levels of protest since 1990s.Footnote 35 In the late Soviet period, officials gathered public opinion by analysing complaint letters and conducting opinion pollsFootnote 36 and ‘citizen inspectors’ played monitory roles during policy implementation.Footnote 37 Jeffrey Hahn has concluded that ‘the image of Soviet citizens as passive recipients of government policies and stoic and uncomplaining subjects lacking legitimate opportunities or the inclination to contest and shape the decisions that affect their lives is inaccurate, at least at the local level’.Footnote 38 Hence, the idea advanced below is not that participation under authoritarianism is a new phenomenon, but that the nature of participation under authoritarianism is changing as domestic state functions shift away from direct service provision and towards regulation. Feedback mechanisms that have not grown out of bureaucratic transformations remain in both Russia and China, and continue to reproduce traditional state-society dynamics, which assume a citizenry dependent on the state for welfare and are embodied in practices such as petitioning, polling, and complaint-making.Footnote 39 But mechanisms are emerging that seek to inculcate new forms of active citizenship, whereby citizens voluntarily provide knowledge and expertise to local officials, such as participatory budgeting, participatory pricing, and new deliberative fora, but simultaneously limit their capacity to effect change. I now consider this proposition in more detail.
In democracies and non-democracies, participatory mechanisms have become more important following the adoption of market principles into state bureaucracies. Beginning in the UK, US, and New Zealand during the late 1970s and early 1980s, national governments around the world have introduced principles drawn from the private sector into domestic public sectors in an ensemble of norms known as New Public Management (NPM). These include the privatisation of state-owned assets, devolution of executive power to the provincial or municipal levels, outsourcing of government functions to businesses and charitable organisations, and monetisation and means testing of welfare.Footnote 40 The result has been a government-driven departure from the so-called ‘command and control’ states of the twentieth century, which provided welfare directly to citizens, and towards types of regulatory states, which engage instead in ‘arms’ length governance’ through fragmented, decentralised, and internationalised agencies.Footnote 41 In regulatory states, governments are no longer the primary source of the knowledge and resources required for the effective policymaking and delivery; consequently, they must establish mechanisms that allow them to access this knowledge and resources in order to manage and oversee the policy process. Citizens are encouraged to become active in local governance since the state is no longer considered capable of fulfilling the task of welfare and service provision alone.Footnote 42 Institutions of what John Keane has termed ‘monitory democracy’ have sprung up alongside elections to extend citizen input into ever-wider spheres of state power.Footnote 43 In non-democratic regulatory states consultative, deliberative, and other types of participatory mechanisms are all the more important in light of the absence or malfunctioning of other feedback channels.
This process of marketisation has fundamentally changed in the way in which governments around the world conceive of the role of citizens in the governing process, affecting the design of participatory institutions and how they are represented to citizens in public discourse. In regulatory states, citizen ‘consumers’ of government services must be able to make rational and informed choices about their needs, and their preferences must be accessed by policymakers to ensure services are developed to meet those needs.Footnote 44 Further, since the fragmentation and decentralisation of formerly centralised state agencies have resulted in private businesses and third sector organisations delivering frontline services, the inclusion of citizens and non-state service providers into policy processes has become an important means for policymakers to garner requisite knowledge.Footnote 45 In short, the role of the citizen in society is transforming as the role of the state shifts away from direct service provision and towards regulation. This new active citizen should be a flexible, resilient, entrepreneurial consumer of public services, able to make informed choices about the services she and her family need.Footnote 46 The task of local governments then becomes the production and curation of this form of citizenship, which is blended with pre-existing norms and traditions of political culture. One of the ways in which this occurs is through practices of participatory authoritarianism.
In their seminal 1963 work, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba argued that the kind of citizen required in a democracy was an ‘allegiant’ one, ‘oriented positively to the input structures and the input process’.Footnote 47 By contrast, in authoritarian states, ‘it is essentially a passive relationship’.Footnote 48 Fifty years later, in a reassessment of Almond and Verba's study, Russell Dalton and Christian Welzel argue that global political culture is shifting towards a more empowered, ‘assertive’ citizen who voices concerns and is critical of her government. They write, ‘In contrast to the allegiant citizen of the past, contemporary publics more often combine a deep normative commitment to democratic ideals with dissatisfaction on how governments fulfil these ideals.’ Even in non-democratic states, they observe this trend: ‘These patterns are most evident in mature, post-industrial democracies but are also emerging in the political cultures of those developing nations in which living conditions are rapidly improving.’Footnote 49 Manifestations of this trend can be observed in Russia and China's changing social strata.
I conclude this discussion by highlighting two important ways in which the concept of participatory authoritarianism enhances our understanding of local governance in Russia and China. First, it contributes to a practice-based understanding of citizenship in contemporary non-democratic contexts – a concept whose notions of rights and responsibilities has led to its neglect in studies of authoritarianism.Footnote 50 Uncovering practices of participatory authoritarianism can reveal how local governments develop controlled forms of active citizenship, which enables effective policymaking, contributes to stable domestic governance, and adheres to international norms.
Secondly, participatory authoritarianism posits a more theoretically nuanced account of the relationship between democratic practices of openness and accountability and authoritarian practices of control and arbitrariness. Rather than a simple ‘corruption’ or ‘distortion’ of democratic norms and practices, participatory authoritarianism highlights their intertwined and co-constitutive nature. It conceives of local democratic and authoritarian practices as coexisting in an ongoing dialogical relationship with one another, each being implemented in response to the situation created by the implementation of the other.Footnote 51 In contrast to the process inherent within Hegelian dialectics, a dialogical process does not presume a resolution or synthesis – there is no ultimate attainment of (or transition to) a final ideal state. Instead, a dialogical relationship sees democratic and authoritarian logics co-existing simultaneously, constantly interacting and evolving in response to one another, and producing sets of practices that reflect and embody these dynamics as they change over time. In this way, it inverses the Foucauldian insight that liberal-democratic governance is parasitic upon authoritarian practices by suggesting that contemporary authoritarian governance similarly requires democratic practices in order to produce the required political subjectivities.Footnote 52 It also is distinct from conceptions of hybridity since no novel ‘third space’ is attained: the two components remain discrete analytical elements.Footnote 53 As Jan Nederveen Pieterse observed, critics of hybridity argue that it is ‘meaningful only as a critique of essentialism’.Footnote 54 While this critique has been well made in Cultural Studies,Footnote 55 it has not yet penetrated studies of political regimes, where boundary fetishism remains a methodological imperative. But what the rigorous reinforcement of boundaries in the study of democracy and authoritarianism misses is an appreciation of how these two sets of practices operate alongside one another, sustaining and reinforcing one another. The remaining sections show how internationally promoted democratic norms intertwine with domestic authoritarian logics both at the level of state discourse and at the level of local legislation in contemporary Russia and China to produce practices of participatory authoritarianism.
Good governance and participatory authoritarianism in Russia and China
Numerous scholars note the globally embedded nature of domestic bureaucratic transformations.Footnote 56 Kanishka Jayasuria argues that the essential context for domestic institutional change lies within ‘systems of transnational markets and rule-making’.Footnote 57 And, following Soviet collapse in Russia and the instigation of China's reform period under Deng Xiaoping, leaders began to engage with Western economists and policy advisors, and integrating into various intergovernmental bodies that promote governance reform.Footnote 58 Thus, both leaderships were encouraged and, sometimes, required to reflect on and implement recommendations for transforming governance structures. This section highlights Russian and Chinese interactions with international institutions promoting good governance and active citizenship during their respective periods of domestic reform, and explores how these norms have been represented in government discourses. Here, I utilise CDA, which reveals how discourse sustains relations of power and domination, to analyse the relationship between economic reform, democracy, and the citizen articulated the speeches and written texts by the Russian and Chinese leadership.Footnote 59 The analysis shows that while both consider it important and necessary to open their bureaucracies to the market and enhance the role of the citizen in local governance, a similar opening of domestic political systems is considered a separate and highly undesirable issue. Mechanisms involving participatory authoritarianism thus constitute a central means by which the contradictions of the marketisation of state bureaucracies in non-democratic political regimes are managed in practice.
Numerous evidence exists for the integration of Russia and China into global networks that promote good governance and public sector reform, although Russia – as the more Western-facing – has achieved this to a greater degree. In 1999, the Russian government ratified the Council of Europe's European Charter of Local Self-Government, which committed signatories to ‘applying basic rules guaranteeing the political, administrative and financial independence of local authorities’.Footnote 60 In China, the dismantling of the cradle-to-grave social security system, the ‘iron rice bowl’, was a condition of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001;Footnote 61 in Russia, the streamlining of the Soviet-era public sector was instigated as Vladimir Putin became president in 2000 and the economic turmoil of the 1990s subsided.Footnote 62 In 2005, the United Nations’ Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government in Seoul 2005 saw 148 states, including Russia and China, sign the Seoul Declaration on Participatory and Transparent Governance, which linked good governance directly to market-oriented public sector reform and encouraged signatories to adapt domestic bureaucracy to facilitate economic competition.Footnote 63 As stipulations by the WTO require transparency in trade-related regulations, policies of open government have been adopted in Russia and China,Footnote 64 a trend that has been explicitly linked to the development of participatory governance.Footnote 65 Local governments in both countries are members of the international organisation that promotes local self-government, United Cities, and Local Governments.Footnote 66 The World Bank has been extremely active in promoting local government reform, both structurally and fiscally: in Russia, its Local Initiative's Support Program has trained local officials and provided technical assistance to increase civic participation in municipal decision-making;Footnote 67 while in China, projects have focussed on healthcare and local budget reform.Footnote 68 World Bank participatory budgeting initiatives have also be conducted in both countries.
At the same time, many of these externally promoted norms have been modified and rearticulated in the domestic rhetoric of government leadership. While the terms ‘government’ and ‘governance’ have the same translation in Russian (upravlenie), the idea that the governing process is not the sole preserve of state officials has been a common theme under Putin. During his presidency, he has continually espoused a normative commitment to the development of non-electoral participatory mechanisms, claiming that a turbulent international environment and the unstoppable forces of globalisation require innovative policies for harnessing citizens’ agency in the service of national development.Footnote 69 For Putin, market-oriented transformations in state bureaucracy require citizens to engage in governance, since ‘welfare hand-outs without taking responsibility for one's actions are simply no longer possible in the 21st century’.Footnote 70 New deliberative mechanisms have been proliferating since the inception of the Federal Public Chamber in 2005, producing regional, municipal, and even district-level public chambers. Putin has personally supported a number of initiatives promoting active citizenship, including the All Russian People's Front, a large, amorphous civic union, of which he is the figurehead and whose aim is ‘to provide every person with a chance to create, to build a great country, a great Russia’.Footnote 71 In his speeches to the Federal Assembly, Putin frequently calls upon this organisation to take the lead in executing a variety of social tasks, including conducting civilian oversight of environmental issuesFootnote 72 and monitoring citizens’ access to healthcare.Footnote 73 In May 2018, he signed Presidential Decree No. 204, stating that by 2024, local governments should ‘create a mechanism for direct citizen participation in the formation of a comfortable urban environment, and increase the number of citizens participating in solving urban development issues by up to 30 percent’.Footnote 74
An analogous trend is observable in Chinese rhetoric, with leadership transforming its vocabulary to reflect global shifts in approaches to government. In the latter half of the 1980s, the idea of the ‘three selfs’ became prominent in government discourse to legitimise government restructuring: self-management, self-education and self-service. This reiteration of ‘self’ reinforces the globally promoted neoliberal idea of resilient and self-reliant citizenship mentioned above. As Jude Howell notes, ‘it signals a more indirect role for the state whereby it regulates rather than commands, paralleling the direction of market reforms’.Footnote 75 In the early 2000s, the slogan ‘Small Government, Large Society’ was coined to promote the downsizing of the public sector.Footnote 76 Around the same time, the concept of ‘orderly participation’ [you xu canyu] – now a central concept in Chinese governance – first appeared in government discourse. The new role of government considered to be to ‘lead citizens to manage themselves according to the law [yindao renmin qunzhong yifa guanli ziji de shiqing]’.Footnote 77 ‘Orderly participation’ was repeated in Jiang Zemin's 2002 Party Congress report,Footnote 78 in Hu Jintao's report five years later,Footnote 79 and most recently in Xi Jinping's 2017 speech to the 19th Party Congress. Across the three speeches, the idea that the role of government should be to nurture citizens’ self-management is repeatedly emphasised, expanded upon and linked to ‘orderly participation’ in governance – already by 2006, Gary Sigley had noted a ‘shift in vocabulary and conceptualization within Chinese discourse from a notion of “government” (zhengfu) as a task of “planning” (jihua) and “administration” (xingzheng) to one that involves “management” (guanli) and “governance” (zhili)’.Footnote 80 Xi's 2017 speech goes further to emphasise his administration's commitment to the establishment of a regulatory state in China: ‘The government needs to transform its functions, further streamline administration and delegate powers, develop new ways of regulation and supervision … building itself into a service-oriented government.’Footnote 81
While both leaders embrace this new, NPM-inspired approach to state functions, PutinFootnote 82 and XiFootnote 83 claim that external political models cannot be imposed upon the societies they govern, and leaders and analysts have developed new conceptualisations of democracy. In Russia, the concept of ‘managed democracy’ entered the political lexicon in the early 2000s, seeking to capture the way in which political competition is controlled, or ‘managed’, by the country's leaders in order to ensure stability.Footnote 84 Around the same time, the term ‘sovereign democracy’ was evoked by Kremlin strategist Vladislav Surkov, underscoring Russia's independence from foreign incursions, following the Colour Revolutions sweeping the post-Soviet space.Footnote 85 In China, the term ‘consultative’ or ‘deliberative’ (xieshang) democracy appears in government discourse to capture the role of the citizen in China's one-party state. According to CCP theorists, socialist deliberative democracy is unique to China and stems from mass line ideology, and involves ‘conducting extensive consultations before and after decision-making, and striving to form a consensus’.Footnote 86 This attempt to maintain a clear ideological thread to the Maoist period contrasts with the dramatic bureaucratic reforms undertaken since that period, but is vital for the CCP's claims to legitimacy in an era of regulatory statehood. Clearly, the Russian and Chinese reformulations of democracy are very different, emerging from each state's unique historical context and geopolitical circumstances; however, they share the common purpose of legitimating the combination of democratising practices of openness and pluralism with the authoritarian practices of control and monism.
As mentioned, pre-existing political cultures and meanings frame the legitimation of new conceptualisations. In the two countries, tensions exist in this sphere. In China, new models of active citizenship fit well with the mass line, which allows Chinese leaders to present new modes of participation as a continuation of Chinese socialism and a means of ‘national rejuvenation’.Footnote 87 However, as Howell notes, ‘The Leninist notion of an elite vanguard of Party workers collides with the more democratic notion of active citizenship.’Footnote 88 Thus, party leaders must balance the promotion of active citizenship with the CCP's leading role in society. Promoting participatory authoritarianism is one way of doing this. The Russian case is more challenging still: Soviet collapse left Russia bereft of a legitimating ideology for these tools (and for governance in general). It is therefore harder for Russian leadership to justify them, and leaves them open to criticism as ‘Potemkin villages’ and ‘window dressing’.Footnote 89 Becoming active in local governance is consistently framed in Putin's speeches to the Federal Assembly as a patriotic duty in the face of a challenging global environment. Thus, domestic rhetoric has not simply reproduced global discourses, but has attempted to incorporate them into extant traditions and narratives of governance.
In Russia and China, leaders share the global commitment to transforming government functions away from direct welfare provision and towards forms of regulatory statehood, while eschewing the forms of political pluralism that have accompanied this transformation in the West. Yet, as discussed above, this shift from government to governance requires mechanisms for citizen participation: without such mechanisms, regulation-oriented governments are unable to formulate effective policy or ensure that it is delivered. Practices of participatory authoritarianism enable governments to elicit citizens’ views without affecting overall non-democratic political stability.
Institutions and practices of participatory authoritarianism in Russia and China
In international policy-oriented parlance, the regulation and development of government-organised mechanisms of participatory governance fall under the umbrella of local self-government (hereafter LSG), and has been substantially reshaped in both countries following market reforms.Footnote 90 Distinguished from more independent, ‘unauthorised’ forms of participation, such as demonstrations, pickets, and some autonomous civic groups,Footnote 91 which may be considered as belonging to civil society, LSG is an important feature of local political organisation in both countries, and includes practices such as public hearings and consultations, monitory activities, participatory budgeting, and participatory pricing. Some of these, such as hearings and monitory activities, embody traditional state-society relations, since officials retain full control of the agenda and citizens occupy a supplicant role. Some, such as participatory budgeting, some types of consultations, and participatory pricing require new forms of active citizenship as citizens is conceived as a designer of policy outcomes and government control is partially – but only partially – ceded. This section traces the legislative development of LSG in Russia and China, and illustrates the two practices of participatory authoritarianism outlined in the first section. It reveals the emergence of new mechanisms that combine democratic and authoritarian practices, which enable officials to acknowledge citizens’ political agency while harnessing it in service of state-directed projects.
The development of LSG has taken diverse trajectories in Russia and China, not least thanks to the differing relationships between central and subnational governments. In China, central government encourages local authorities to engage in policy experimentations in what Sebastian Heilmann calls ‘experimentation under hierarchy’.Footnote 92 Promotion for local cadres often depends on their capacity to develop innovative government mechanisms.Footnote 93 Hence, the development of participatory mechanisms has taken a locally multifarious trajectory, with some cities, such as Hangzhou and Shanghai, becoming national leaders in participatory innovations, while others, such as Xi'an, lacking such developments.Footnote 94 This means that although Russia is a federation, composed of relatively autonomous ‘federal subjects’, greater homogeneity in governance practices exists across Russia's regions and municipalities, owing to Putin's policies of recentralisation during the 2000s.Footnote 95 It is therefore far easier to generalise about LSG in Russia than in China, since the diversity of practices in the latter is vast. I now consider the legislative development in each case.
Russia's institutions of LSG were created during the early post-Soviet period during something of a golden era for local governance. Article 12 of the 1993 Constitution states: ‘Local self-government shall be independent within the limits of its authority. The bodies of local self-government shall not be part of the system of bodies of state authority.’Footnote 96 In short, LSG should operate independently from state bureaucracy, becoming the primary site for citizens to engage in local politics. Opinions diverge on what this relationship means in practice: total independence from the state; a hybrid expression of civil society delivering government services; or a pragmatic limitation of government intervention in local politics.Footnote 97 However, researchers agree that the combination of subnational political hierarchies, complicated legislation and public apathy has stymied the development of an independent LSG.Footnote 98
The three primary national-level legislative documents for the development of Russian LSG are the 1995 Federal Law 154 ‘On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government’;Footnote 99 the 2003 Federal Law 131 ‘On the Organisation of Local Self Government’;Footnote 100 and the 2014 Federal Law 212-FZ ‘On the Basis of Public Control in the Russian Federation’.Footnote 101 In each, the dual logics of openness and control are evident. For instance, the 1995 law devolved responsibility for the regulation of LSG to the regional level. However, studies show that these reforms intended to enhance LSG actually resulted their subordination to the regional authorities.Footnote 102 It also resulted in a wide variety of local legislative arrangements, many of which undermined the principle of independence set out in the Constitution.Footnote 103 The 2003 law sought to minimise this heterogeneity and, while it delineates the organisational form of territories of LSG in a manner that can be universally applied, Chapter Five specifies the forms that civic participation can take, including a local referendum, municipal elections, a citizens’ meeting or conference, a citizens’ lawmaking initiative, public hearings, public debates, polls, and citizens' appeals to local governments. Some of these, such as polls, hearings, and appeals, replicate Soviet-era state-society dynamics, but others, such as law-making initiatives and debates, seek to foment this more active citizenship, which was developed in the 2014 legislation.
This 2014 law has had the greatest effect for LSG as facilitating practices of participatory authoritarianism in Russia. It extended and elaborated the developing network of participatory mechanisms, specifying their organisation, their outputs and the government's response. Such mechanisms include holding a public examination (obshchestvennaya ekspertiza), whereby local civic experts study draft laws and assess their societal impact, and conducting public inspections (obshchestvennye proverki), in which monitory bodies staffed by members of the public collect information on government bodies considered to be poorly performing and develop remedial proposals. Importantly, each of these mechanisms are linked to public chambers, public councils, and other corporate bodies, which de facto undermines the critical or pluralistic potential of participation, predisposing them to upholding the status quo. At the same time, this law has been widely criticised as contradicting large swathes of existing legislation, and being extremely difficult to implement.Footnote 104 Local scholars and activists in Russia admitted to not understanding the differences between the various types of participatory mechanism or how they should be implemented in practice.Footnote 105 This means that while there is extensive legislation governing local civic participation in Russia, in practice, these activities tend to be ad hoc, open to change and easily manipulable.
In China, LSG as a form of local political management is enshrined in the Constitution (its current version dating to 1982). Article 111 of Section Five states that the most local form of urban government, the residents’ committees, should ensure ‘people's mediation, public security, public health and other matters in order to manage public affairs and social services in their areas, mediate civil disputes, help maintain public order and convey residents’ opinions and demands and make suggestions to the people's government’.Footnote 106 The Constitution states that committee's chairpersons and deputies should be directly elected by the residents; however, interview respondents indicated that the most appropriate people for the job are often selected in an uncompetitive process.Footnote 107 At the same time, unlike the Russian legislation, the institutional forms that local governance should take are not specified, which has enabled authorities in China to experiment with innovations in community governance. Also, unlike Russia, there is no official database or website that holds all Chinese legislation, and they are scattered across different areas of government. Hence, given the vast regional variations and the limitations of space, I focus here on the expansion of residents committees (juweihui) as a participatory innovation developed directly in response to market-oriented bureaucratic transformation, which extends across all urban areas in China and through which other grassroots participatory activities are often organised.
Prior to reform, urban Chinese citizens were organised into socialist work units known as danwei, which were attached to State-Owned Enterprises and through which welfare including housing, medical care, pensions, and subsidies for food and transport were distributed to employees. As market reforms were introduced in 1980s, the bulk of local welfare provision was shifted from the danwei to the local community – in particular, to local residents’ committees. This entailed a profound transformation in the relationship between citizens and local government, and innovations in community governance were developed as a response to the void left by this sudden withdrawal of state-organised social provision.Footnote 108 Article 2 of the 1989 ‘Law of the Organization of Residents’ Committee’, which delineated residents’ committees new role in decentralised governance, defines them as ‘a grass-roots autonomous organization for the realization of residents’ self-management, self-education and self-service’.Footnote 109 In 2000, Beijing became concerned about the social and ideological void left by the dismantling of the danwei system, and tasked the Ministry of Civil Affairs with developing initiatives to revitalise local communities and strengthen Party control. It published a document stating that community building work was a ‘crucial tool in national efforts to promote social development, to raise living standards, to expand grass-roots democracy and to maintain urban stability’.Footnote 110 Local residents’ committees were designated as one of the central actors in this process, and should encourage citizens to participate in local governance at the street level by organising voluntary and socially relevant activities.Footnote 111 It is mostly at this street level, with the help of residents’ committees, that various experimental participatory activities have taken place, such as participatory budgeting initiatives, as it is here that is considered to form the basis for the construction of support for the Party-state.Footnote 112 Thus, unlike in Russia, the presence of the ruling party is felt even at the grassroots level, and residents’ committees members are preselected and should also be members of the CCP.Footnote 113
Despite these greater levels of penetration into society by the Party-state, examples abound of the development of new participatory mechanisms in various cities and city-districts in China, including participatory budgeting initiatives, the use of local government offices as open forums to garner citizens’ policy proposals, and the development of ‘open-style government’ in which city officials establish an advisory group composed of civic experts to conduct oversight and provide expert input.Footnote 114 At the same time, their democratising potential must not be overstated – these mechanisms are only advisory in nature, and are usually dominated by the local CCP members. I now turn to an elucidation of the practices of participatory authoritarianism that are being produced through these various mechanisms of LSG in Russia and China.Footnote 115
The first practice, which occurs at the level of process, involves local officials widening citizens’ participation in policy processes, while deliberately limiting the democratising potential, for example by vetting potential participants to ensure access only to compliant individuals or ejecting participants during the event for airing inappropriate opinions. This means that citizens with a background of activism are often excluded, while explicitly ‘pro-regime’ individuals or apolitical celebrities are admitted.Footnote 116 One respondent in Samara, Russia, explained, ‘The method of selection is to a large extent controlled. Firstly people don't choose the candidates they want, but the candidates they are told to choose … Or they choose the people whose names they recognise. I don't really believe in the selection process.’Footnote 117 City activists with particular expertise (for instance, accessibility for disabled people or recycling initiatives) may be invited to represent their cause in policy forums and initiatives, but if their participation is considered too antagonistic, the invitation may be withdrawn.Footnote 118 Respondents in Russia suspected that some participants were specially planted by local officials to disrupt the proceedings or ensure the outcomes desired by the government.Footnote 119 In China, participants should ideally be CCP members and are nearly always vetted by local officials before they can take part.Footnote 120 In both cases, tales abound of individuals whose invitation to participate was withdrawn after they aired opinions deemed overly critical.Footnote 121
The second practice, occurring at the level of outcome, involves local officials conducting a participatory event, but de-emphasising its results, for example by privately making the relevant decisions beforehand, drastically watering down any transformative potential in the follow-up legislation or using a heavily engineered participatory event to justify broader public policy decisions. In China's participatory pricing initiatives (explicitly developed to manage the transition to a market economy), decisions are sometimes already made before citizens are invited to deliberate.Footnote 122 One Hangzhou-based interviewee explained, ‘Why do governments hold participatory activities? They want to show that the public supports their activities. People will complain less if they are invited to talk to the government.’Footnote 123 In participatory budgeting initiatives in both Russia and China, local officials reserve the right to deselected projects deemed inappropriate.Footnote 124 In the case of Russian participatory institutions, members are under no illusions regarding the limitations of their influence, believing they have leverage in some, relatively marginal or apolitical areas but not in others considered to be of strategic importance.Footnote 125 In both cases, new deliberative or consultative initiatives are formally advisory, meaning that local governments can easily disregard inconvenient recommendations. Yet citizens are not always ignored – research on participatory institutions in both states demonstrate that they do have limited impact on policy outcomes.Footnote 126 One member of a participatory body in Samara recalled, ‘There have been three instances so far in the Public Budget Council when they took the societal experts’ advice either in full or in part.’Footnote 127 Since the council's term is normally three years, this would amount to adopting citizens’ recommendations once a year.
Despite this similar approach to curating participatory governance, Russia and China evince very different state-society relations: studies report consistently high levels of trust in public institutions among Chinese citizens,Footnote 128 while in Russia the opposite is the case.Footnote 129 This stark contrast was reflected in the way participants framed their engagement in interviews: in China, it was seen as an important patriotic duty, with some invoking Xi Jinping's pronouncements on participation,Footnote 130 while in Russia, a majority reported disappointment and frustration with the way in which the authorities interacted with them. One citizen explained, ‘I really saw some officials who were not so stereotypical, who were really willing to make some changes and to make this project work, and that was refreshing, but most of them, I'm afraid, are stereotypical!’Footnote 131 Stemming from this, government-organised participatory bodies in China tend to be guided and delimited from above by Party-oriented organisations, remain closely tied to the CCP, and reflect the overall dominant position of the local state in society. In this context, participatory authoritarianism represents something of an opening-up for policymaking processes in China.Footnote 132 In Russia, however, analogous bodies in part aim to mitigate the dire relations between state and society. In the words of one senior St Petersburg official, ‘[citizens’] loyalty to the government is in a very sad position – they don't like the government, but they hate it’.Footnote 133 Thus practices of participatory authoritarianism in Russia seek to tone down – or co-opt – anti-government sentiment into something more palatable and constructive for local officials.
Conclusion
This article has presented the concept of participatory authoritarianism, and its small typology of practices, as a means for understanding how new forms of active citizenship are conceived and managed in Russia and China. These practices include simultaneously extending participatory opportunities while restricting who can participate, and holding participatory events but undermining their outcomes. While the nature of state-society relations in Russia and China differ substantially, both governments are attempting to harness the growing desire of citizens to engage in local politics while ensuring that the state remains dominant. The result is the legislative development and discursive legitimation of a form of citizenship that requires engagement but compliance, responsibility but obedience, autonomy but restraint.
Three conclusions about the nature of local governance in contemporary non-democratic states can be drawn from this discussion. First, new forms of civic participation have become necessary, as non-democratic governments have implemented market reforms of the public sectors without undergoing broader processes of democratisation. The consequence of shifting towards regulatory statehood is that governments are no longer the primary source of knowledge or expertise about policy requirements, and input by non-state actors becomes essential for effective policy-making and delivery. The proliferation of participatory mechanisms therefore provide evidence that market-oriented bureaucratic transformation cannot occur without the provision of some avenues of political engagement for citizens. Practices of participatory authoritarianism constitute governments’ attempts to manage and limit this political transformation.
Second, the article proposed that types of active citizenship are important in non-democratic states like Russia and China. Indeed, Russian and Chinese leaders have embraced the notion of civic participation, seeking to incorporate it into broader theories and ideologies of governing. This demonstrates that voluntary practices of civic participation enacted by active and engaged citizens are considered essential for local governance in an era of late capitalism, as market-oriented political subjectivities are produced through interactions between the individual and the local state – in democratic and non-democratic regimes alike.Footnote 134 At the same time, the way in which these practices are manifested and integrated into broader systems of political meanings are culturally specific and historically contingent, as demonstrated above. Hence, participatory authoritarianism opens the possibility of unsettling the ‘territorial trap’ that links types of political practices to certain geographical locales by suggesting that all states are constituted by practices that include both ‘democratic’ practices of openness and accountability and ‘authoritarian’ practices of control and arbitrariness.Footnote 135 Thus, it extends Foucault's analysis of liberalism in an era of late capitalism by demonstrating that both strategies of governing are productive of and rely upon each other in contemporary non-democracies as well. Works on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ attest to the co-constitutive nature of liberalising and authoritarian tendencies in Western contexts; I have illustrated that similar insights can apply to the ‘non-West’.Footnote 136
Finally, the article has shown how non-democratic leaders incorporate global, ostensibly democratic norms of governance into domestic practices of authoritarian rule. As the two states have engaged with international organisations promoting good governance and public sector reform, so their leaders have increasingly adopted analogous language and promoted greater roles for citizens in local policy processes. However, the way in which this discourse has been embodied in legislation, and the practices that are emerging as a result, demonstrate how the democratic potential of these global norms can be stymied by pre-existing political cultures. It reveals that global democracy promotion may often consolidate domestic authoritarian governance.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Eva Thomann, the participants of the 2019 ECPR Joint Sessions workshop, ‘Authoritarianism Beyond the State’ in UCL Mons, and the participants of the 2019 Symposium, ‘Global Crisis of Democracy? The Rise and Evolution of Authoritarianism and Populism’ at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, for extremely useful comments and discussion on earlier drafts of this article.
