Tom BjorkmanWashington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003, x, 141pp, US$39.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8157-0898-X), US$16.95 paper (ISBN 0-8157-0899-8)Tom Bjorkman takes on those who see authoritarianism as the wave of Russia's future. Agreeing with the consensus that the Putin presidency has seen a substantial retrenchment from the gains in human rights and electoral democracy achieved with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bjorkman also detects countervailing trends. Substantial factors favour a deepening of the minimal, or as he calls it electoral, democracy prevailing in Russia today. Survey research shows that weighty majorities of Russians continue to believe that free and fair elections are the only appropriate means of choosing Russia's political leadership and continue to favour the introduction of separation of powers with more legislative and judicial balance to counteract Russia's current overweening super-presidency. Russians see a truly independent and honest judiciary as the principal necessity for safeguarding their rights. Bjorkman points out that surveys of elites in Russia, as in other democratic countries, record an even stronger majority in favour of democratic institutions and a competitive market economy predominantly held by private ownership. Finally, while reviewing the series of measures taken under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin to limit press freedom and the autonomy of regional governors, Bjorkman still concludes that Putin's personal commitment to democratic institutions holds out hope. He also believes that the United States can make policy changes that will encourage a democratic future for Russia.In my view, the argument is nugatory. After five decades of research, political scientists have produced no compelling theory of democracy. The only consistent correlate of democracy that has been discovered is economic development, and while the most developed countries in the world are democracies, at middling levels of development, where Russia stands, some are and some are not. While economic development favours democracy, furthermore, no one understands why. The link between economic development and democracy cannot be traced, despite decades of effort, because no one understands how individual voters overcome the incentive to abstain from a process in which they pay a cost in time and energy to vote but their chance of affecting the outcome of an election is vanishingly slight.If no one can offer any compelling explanation of why countries become democratic, Bjorkman can find no basis, nor can anyone else, for arguing that Russia's future course will tend toward deepening democracy or toward abandoning it in favour of authoritarianism, soft or hard. Bjorkman asserts that political culture makes the difference. Although many observers have proposed that popular and elite attitudes toward democracy determine whether it flourishes, there is no systematic evidence of such a relationship, and the historical record argues against it. Every new democracy has begun in a culture suffused with profoundly anti-democratic attitudes--those shaped by the experience of the previous anti-democratic regime. At the same time, anyone who has experienced life under tyranny may safely be assumed to nourish a hidden longing for democracy. …