Politics and the ethnic divide: Is Dagestan changing from complex to simple oligarchy?

Abstract

The Republic of Dagestan, one of the 89 constituent ‘subjects’ of the Russian Federation, has a very ‘multi-national people’, which poses particular difficulties of institutional design. Since the early 1990s, in a particular variant of consociational democracy, representation of different ethnic groups in Dagestan's parliament was in fact guaranteed by the reservation of electoral districts for candidates of a specific nationality. Representation of specific economic interests and representation of specific ideological positions were conflated with and subsumed under representation of ethnicity. In recent years, however, constitutional changes, legal challenges and other factors have brought about a new situation which threatens to bring about the entrenchment of particular clans, headed by a strong presidential figure. The relationship with Moscow, which may intervene to appoint the head of Dagestan along with those of other ‘subjects’ of the Russian Federation, may help defuse potential inter-ethnic tensions but at the cost of developing democracy in the republic.