Political conflict and institutional design: Paths of party development in Russia

Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics

Volumn 14, Issue 1-2, 1998, Pages 201-223

  Remington, Thomas F ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DOMESTIC POLITICS; INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE; PARTY DEVELOPMENT; POLITICAL CONFLICT; POLITICAL SYSTEM;

RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 0031876411     PISSN: 13523279     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13523279808415375     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability and Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, 'Introduction: Party Systems in Latin America', in Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (eds.), Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp.1-34; Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
2. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 'Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments', in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter
3. Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967).
4. Russell Dalton, Scott Flanagan and Paul Beck (eds.), Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
5. Geoffrey Evans and Stephen Whitefield, 'Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in Eastern Europe', British Journal of Political Science, Vol.23 (1993), pp.521-48; Herbert Kitschelt, 'The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe', Politics and Society, Vol.20 (1992), pp.7-50; Herbert Kitschelt, 'Formation of Party Cleavages in PostCommunist Democracies'. Party Politics, Vol.1, No.4 (1995), pp.447-72; Hubert Tworzecki, Parlies and Politics in Post-1989 Poland (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); Stephen White, Richard Rose and lan McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1997).
6. Thomas F. Remington and Steven S. Smith, 'The Development of Parliamentary Parties in Russia', Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol.20, No.4 (1995), pp.457-90; Thomas F. Remington and Steven S. Smith, 'The Early Legislative Process in the Russian Federal Assembly', Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.2, No. 1 ( 1996), pp. 161 -92.
7. Segodnya, 6 Dec. 1996.
8. White, Rose and McAllister, How Russia Votes.
9. Data drawn from Moshe Haspel, Thomas F. Remington and Steven S. Smith, 'Electoral Institutions and Party Cohesion in the Russian Duma', Journal of Politics (forthcoming), Table I. Cohesion is a measure of the proportion of times a given member of the fraction or group voted identically with the median member of that fraction or group on each electronically recorded floor vote included in the data-set. A faction's cohesion score is thus a mean value for the party agreement scores of all its members. 'Exit faction' refers to the criterion for identifying faction affiliation: we identify members according to the fraction or group to which deputies belonged at the close of the 1995 session. The analysis uses all those votes in which the voting alignments could be predicted knowing deputies' factional affilations. That is, we chose all those votes for which the estimated multiple r was at least .5 in a linear model where each deputy's 'yea' or 'nay' vote was regressed against a series of dummy variables representing the deputy fractions and groups. This procedure is intended to yield the equivalent of the standard 'party vote' measure employed in analysis of party cohesion in a two-party setting such as the US Congress. About half (2,810 out of 5,548) of the full number of Duma votes over 1994-95 met this criterion.
10. For the results of principal components analysis of electronically recorded roll-calls in the second-ninth Congresses of People's Deputies, see Remington et al., 'Transitional Institutions and Parliamentary Alignments', in T.F. Remington (ed.), Parliaments in Transition: The New Legislative Politics in the Former USSR and Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); for the results of a similar analysis of voting in the 1994-95 Duma, see Remington and Smith, 'The Development of Parliamentary Parties in Russia'.
11. The parliament is to approve annually a list of enterprises subject to privatization; the state may re-nationalize enterprises without compensation if the new owners fail to satisfy certain requirements; and the state may not conduct any more 'trust auctions' whereby banks acquired management rights over controlling packages of state shares in enterprises in return for sizeable loans to the government.
12. Secondary dimensions also appear in the 1996 analysis, but are much weaker. The first factor accounts for over 45 per cent of the variance in voting alignments, the second less than eight per cent. The first factor loads strongly on votes pertaining to social spending, property relations (such as the land code), and the denunciation of the Belovezh treaty; the second is associated with votes on the Human Rights Commissioner, the Chechen war, and the union with Belarus. On these issues Yabloko and LDPR stand starkly at opposite extremes.
13. Aldrich, Why Parties?; Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Kaare Strom, Minority Government and Majority Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
14. Josephine T. Andrews, Legislative Instability: The Dynamics of Agenda Control in the Russian Parliament, 1990-1993 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996); Mikhail G. Myagkov and D. Roderick Kiewiet, 'Czar Rule in the Russian Congress of People's Deputies?', Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol.21, No.l (1996), pp.5-40; Thomas F. Remington, Steven S. Smith, D. Roderick Kiewiet et al., 'Transitional Institutions and Parliamentary Alignments in Russia', in Remington (ed.), Parliaments in Transition, pp.159-80; Alexander Sobianin, 'Political Cleavages Among the Russian Deputies', in Remington (ed.). Parliaments in Transition, pp. 181-216.
15. Steven L. Solnick, 'The Political Economy of Russian Federalism: A Framework for Analysis', Problems of Post-Communism (Nov.-Dec. 1996), pp.13-25.
16. Peter C. Ordeshook, 'Russia's Party System: Is Russian Federalism Viable?' Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.12, No.3 (1996), pp.195-217.
17. M.Steven Fish, 'The Advent of Multipartism in Russia', Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.11, No.4 (1995).