In Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond, Jessica Pisano depicts post-Soviet politics in Russia and Ukraine as emblematic of a “global shift in how states construe their responsibilities to individuals and individuals understand their responsibilities to states” (p. 7). Specifically, the book uses the lens of political theater to illustrate how the contemporary capitalist order grants those in power opportunities to mobilize the economically vulnerable for political purposes. In many instances, the process involves local authorities using control over public goods and social services to command popular support for themselves or their superiors. Although Pisano concedes that a combination of motivations drives participants to engage in political theater, individual decisions about whether to participate ultimately hinge on the possibility of economic retribution. Thus, even though the empirical analysis relies on years of participant observation and offers an abundance of riveting examples, the underlying storyline is one of instrumentally rational actors responding to material circumstances: “why people participate in political theater is a material story, one that has to do with the connection between how people are situated in market economies and what kinds of choices are available to them in politics” (p. 30).

Because Pisano notes that relatives of political theater can be found across time (e.g., imperial Russia) and space (e.g., Africa, Latin America, and the United States; pp. 7–8), her conclusions serve as a cautionary tale that speak both to developing states and established democracies. In Russia and Ukraine, the existence of command performances is not only common knowledge but the practice has also bred suspicion and doubt about the authenticity of democratic participation, even among individuals with the means to escape elite pressure. Moreover, Pisano sees political theater as gaining traction in established democracies. As evidence, she points to Donald Trump’s willingness to hire actors to play the role of political supporters and efforts by US companies to exert electoral pressure on employees. According to Pisano, these developments not only expand the space available for disinformation campaigns but also have the potential to transform politics in consolidated democracies: the more that Western elites are willing to stage democracy, the more likely it will be that political contestation in these societies will be defined by elites offering protection in return for political loyalty (pp. 176–79).

Readers may question Pisano’s transition from using the metaphor of political theater to understand post-Soviet politics in Russia and Ukraine to asserting that consolidated democracies may experience similar fates. After all, democracy is more than the holding of elections. Although electoral participation and contestation certainly characterize democracy, democracy also requires the presence of civil liberties and political rights that help protect citizens from state abuses. Pisano, at least implicitly, acknowledges such differences. She questions, for example, whether America’s existing guardrails are enough to stave off democratic erosion.

In general, however, Pisano proves more interested in identifying commonalities across regime types than in determining the degree to which regimes differences might explain differences in the practice of political theater. As she notes, the book “temporarily brackets generalizations about the concentration of power, the rule of law, and the extent of freedom upon which traditional regime-type designations depend” (p. 7). However, because neither the book’s title nor its conclusions bracket regime type, it seems reasonable to wonder how much of the global shift in terms of how states and citizens relate to one another reflects the global spread of electoral authoritarianism identified by Andreas Schedler (e.g., The Politics of Uncertainty, 2013). Likewise, differences in regime type might help explain variation within and across Russia and Ukraine. Chapter 2, for example, traces the history of political theater through the tsarist and Soviet periods. As Pisano observes, one way in which recent political theater differs from previous eras is its attempt to convey “the idea that contemporary Russian politics are democratic, and that the government is responsive to citizens’ concerns” (p. 50). In other words, Russia’s post-Soviet political regime has sought to derive legitimacy from creating a democratic façade, one that combines the appearance of competitive elections with authoritarian practices (i.e., electoral authoritarianism). In Ukraine, meanwhile, the “mechanisms of control” used during national elections appear to vary depending on whether the electoral campaigns are those of authoritarian-leaning politicians (Kuchma and Yanukovych) or reformers (Yushchenko) (p. 166).

Pisano is right to contend that regime type describes the politics of entire polities, whereas political theater is more applicable for understanding the development of groups and group boundaries (p. 167). She is also correct that political theater allows us to see “local contours of a political shift that is prior to and deeper than regime change” (p. 163). These assertions do not, however, challenge the utility of regime types. Rather, they highlight how Pisano’s emphasis is on a lower level of aggregation than work that seeks to compare how politics operates in different national or subnational regimes. Scholars interested in differences across regime types would not be surprised to read that “people’s experiences of interaction with state agents vary not only from region to region, but also from street to street and from household to household” (p. 166). What concerns them is whether differences in regime type or regime trajectory make command performances more common or more frequent in certain polities than in others.

It is worth noting that the literature on post-Soviet elections in Russia and Ukraine regularly discusses temporal and spatial variations in elite pressure, often referring to the use of “administrative resources.” Unfortunately, this term functions almost as a residual category, capturing a wide range of practices from falsified ballots to the kinds of coerced political participation that Pisano describes. Thus, future work on the mechanisms that elites use to drive political participation in general and to influence election outcomes specifically should find Staging Democracy valuable. Chapter 3 reveals how changes in local economies following the Soviet Union’s dissolution made a broader cross-section of Russian and Ukrainian citizens more dependent on their employers and local authorities. Chapters 4 and 5, meanwhile, explain how local elites converted goods and services conventionally deemed public entitlements into a system of state-controlled privileges reserved for those who demonstrate political fealty. With this foundation laid, chapter 6 exposes the challenge of understanding what political participation means in these contexts, and chapter 7 discusses how the ambiguity associated with the meaning of participation serves those in power.

In the spirit of Pisano’s desire to move beyond regime type, others might focus on variations in the quality of governance. Like Pisano, Bo Rothstein (The Quality of Government 2011), for example, observes that corruption, low trust, and inequality are common features of daily life in many countries, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Rothstein, one route for limiting elite abuses of state power in such contexts is the establishment of impartial institutions, like independent courts and a nonpartisan, professional civil service. Although one might contend that these institutions are more likely to emerge in democratic than authoritarian regimes, this is not always so, and one should expect command performances to be more likely in democratic regimes where impartiality is in short supply. It is notable that Rothstein’s emphasis on impartial institutions echoes Pisano’s contention that more capitalism is not a solution to the politicization of public services (pp. 172–75). As Rothstein observes, “you can have a market for anything as long as you do not have a market for everything” (2011, p. 209; emphasis in the original). At the same time, Rothstein’s focus on the origins and operation of impartial institutions reminds both citizens and scholars that a well-functioning democracy, one that protects its citizens from elite pressure, requires much more than the holding of competitive elections.

Overall, Staging Democracy offers several keen insights. For example, because variations in command performances reflect how local economic institutions interact with the state, one should expect the operation of political theater to function differently in villages, provincial cities, and capital cities. Although one can imagine different reasons why economic pressures might be greater in the provinces than in capital cities (e.g., less anonymity, fewer employment opportunities), Pisano identifies two potential exceptions. First, she submits that people living near state borders might benefit from a cross-border labor market, making them less dependent on local economies. Second, she suggests that where command performances in capital cities assume greater significance, elite pressure may be lower for citizens residing in the countryside (p. 19). Although Pisano concludes that no real difference exists between the center and periphery on these counts, the book also “expressly did not involve the kind of research wherein the researcher chooses a set of cases based on a certain kind of variation and then sets about explaining that variation” (p. 20). Staging Democracy, then, illustrates the inner workings of how political theater operates and, in doing so, offers a novel assessment of the potential consequences of command performances while leaving room for future research to empirically interrogate the correlates of those performances.