Russians and Their Party System

Abstract

bourgeois, democracy, observed Barrington Moore. He might just as well have said no parties, democracy. No other mechanism has yet been found for aggregating preferences of citizens, expressing them in form of a government program, and providing a team to carry them out. More generally, parties help to engage citizens in political process on a continuing basis. They provide a form of political education, often including daily press, and sometimes they provide a wider network of social activities, including youth movements, sporting societies, and holiday arrangements. In largest sense of all, they provide for accountability of government by allowing voters to pass judgement on performance of an outgoing team and, when they think it appropriate, to throw rascals out.1There has been little consensus about extent to which Russian parties fulfill these various requirements. American scholars usually have been minimalists, reflecting nature of politics in their own country-parties have identifiers rather than members, they are active during elections but not between them, and they raise money to buy advertising rather than rely on activists to appeal over front doorstep. Europeans more often take a view that reflects their own experience of mass party, a world of which Russian Social Democrats (later Bolsheviks and later still Communist Party of Soviet Union) were themselves a part before World War I. Both would agree, however, that parties are a central element in forms of linkage that connect citizens and government, and that extent to which a system of this kind has been formed in Russia is central to an evaluation of its postcommunist politics. Have Russians, a decade or more after demise of Soviet Union, overcome their antipathy to the party and become citizens rather than subjects? Or do they have what has been described as a floating system, characterized by high levels of turnover, or a client system, dominated by Kremlin itself?2In this article, I first consider some of aggregate evidence that relates to these questions, drawing on a national representative survey conducted in first half of 2005. Second, I draw on a series of focus group discussions that took place immediately after December 2003 Duma and March 2004 presidential elections, which were intended to move beyond tick-box responses to complexity of attitudes that relate voters and nonvoters to parties and candidates that appeal for their support (further details are provided in appendix). I look first at nature of support that Russians give-or fail to give-to their political parties, using survey evidence. Then, I turn to electors themselves. Survey evidence can tell us if individual perceptions are representative of a wider universe, but only qualitative evidence can provide us with experience of ordinary members of society in their own words rather than those of an outsider's questionnaire. Exploring ambiguities of Russian attitudes toward political parties, both are required.Dimensions of Party SupportOne direct measure of place of parties in Russian system is extent to which citizens are willing to trust them as compared with other institutions. The national opinion research center has asked questions of this kind since early 1990s (see table 1). Consistently, church and armed forces have enjoyed highest levels of public confidence. The presidency went through a bad patch in later Yeltsin years, but then recovered strongly. Local government was typically more widely respected than central government, and media was more widely respected than agencies of law enforcement, which were more often associated with corruption and mistreatment than with administration of justice. Political parties, however, have consistently come at bottom of list, below even parliament in which they are represented. …