No specialist in the field of communist and postcommunist studies is more adept at combining sound theory and local knowledge than Thomas Remington. Building on his earlier research on Russian presidential decrees (Thomas F. Remington, Steven S. Smith, and Moshe Haspel, “Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation,” Post-Soviet Affairs 14:4 [1998]: 287–322; Moshe Haspel, Thomas F. Remington, and Steven S. Smith, “Lawmaking and Decree Making in the Russian Federation: Time, Space, and Rules in Russian National Policymaking,” Post-Soviet Affairs 22:3 [2006]: 249–275), Remington offers in the work under review an ambitious and compelling comparative analysis of how presidents use legislative powers, such as vetoes and decrees. The study opens with an extended essay on presidential prerogatives, which illustrates that for all the peculiarities of the Russian case, the prerogative powers wielded by the Kremlin are in many ways akin to those employed in Brasilia, Buenos Aires, and Washington. In fact, Remington argues that “the Russian president's decree powers are not inherently undemocratic, nor are they any more far-reaching than the executive prerogative powers exercised by US presidents” (p. xii).
Suspicious of efforts to attribute much explanatory power to formal institutional arrangements alone, the author develops a theory of decree power that reveals the interaction among institutional design, the timing and sequencing of lawmaking and electoral cycles, and “the location in policy space of the president, the legislative majority, and the veto pivot” (p. 42). In carefully crafted case studies of policymaking in Russia, he examines the intricate bargaining games where the use of presidential decrees—or the threat of their use—serves to prompt, amend, or block legislation by parliament. Thus, in spite of constitutional provisions that allow a Russian president to rule by decree in areas where statutory law is silent, which was a broad swath of normative territory in the first years of postcommunist rule, presidential rulemaking has tended to serve as a tool in strategic bargaining over lawmaking, rather than as a simple substitute for statutes.
One of the distinctive features of this book is its serious attention to within-country as well as cross-country comparisons. Remington outlines the development of the decree-making authority of Russian rulers from 1906 to the present, a period that spans tsarist, Soviet, and postcommunist regimes. This discussion highlights both the potent influence of institutional legacies and the similarities and differences in decree making in the Yeltsin and Putin eras. Especially by 2003, when Vladimir Putin had engineered a parliamentary majority that was deferential to the president, the changed political conditions reduced the need for decrees in policymaking. Whereas in some years of the Yeltsin era the total number of normative decrees issued exceeded the number of parliamentary statutes signed into law, the number of statutes enacted grew dramatically in the Putin era, in some years more than doubling the number of decrees issued. Yet after 2006, the middle of Putin's second term, the number of decrees also increased, with many used to renationalize the country's strategic industries. Moreover, the Putin presidency began to confer with both parliament and the Public Chamber—an appointed consultative body—before issuing certain decrees, apparently as a means of building support for the implementation of decrees in the bureaucracy and society. Decrees, therefore, continue to play a prominent political role in Russia even in the presence of a large and loyal presidential majority in parliament.
Because the primary focus of the work is on policymaking and not policy implementation, the book gives relatively little attention to the question of whether decrees achieve their desired policy ends. In some cases, as Remington points out, decrees are self-enforcing. This occurs when individuals or enterprises in search of rents prevail upon the president to grant them privileges in the form of special licenses, favorable tax treatment, or control over state-dominated industries. In most instances, however, decrees face serious hurdles to their implementation. As Remington argues, one of these is the excessive ambition of some of the decrees themselves. Especially in recent years, Putin has issued decrees whose goals are often aspirational rather than realistic; witness Decree no. 599 from 2012, which set specific performance targets for the education sector, including elevating the share of publications by Russian scholars to 2.44% of the total works indexed in the Web of Science (p. 4). In other cases, decrees flounder because of the lack of professionalism and honesty of many state bureaucrats. Instead of being self-enforcing, decrees designed to reduce graft in officialdom have been self-defeating, as President Dmitry Medvedev discovered when he launched an anticorruption campaign.
Remington concludes that this indiscipline of the bureaucracy, taken together with a party system that has no control over the executive, leads the president to rely ever more heavily on informal powers to govern, an approach known in Russian as “manual steering” (ruchnoe upravlenie). “The more he uses these [informal powers],” Remington writes, “the more he subverts his formal presidential authority” (p. 155). This conclusion invites additional research into the ways that oral commands, non-normative decrees, and other presidential directives, such as written assignments (porucheniia), substitute for, or operate parallel to, traditional laws and decrees as tools of Russian politics and administration.
As a study devoted to executive–legislative relations, Presidential Decrees in Russia understandably steers clear of intraexecutive negotiations that shape presidential decrees. It is clear, however, that the policy output emerging from the Kremlin depends as much or more on the interplay among bureaucratic forces in the presidential administration, Council of Ministers, and individual ministries as it does on the more visible bargaining between the presidency and parliament. This unseen face of decree-making power in Russia awaits investigation.
