The Russian predicament

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 113-126

  Colton, Timothy J ^a   Skach, Cindy ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23744495097     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2005.0041     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Giovanni Sartori, for example, suggested that some troubled democracies might benefit from "radically switching to semipresidentialism"; and Gianfranco Pasquino similarly suggested that, "on the whole, under most circumstances, semipresidential systems appear endowed with both more governmental capabilities and more institutional flexibility than parliamentary and presidential systems." See Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives, and Outcomes (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 137;
2. and Gianfranco Pasquino, "Semi-Presidentialism: A Political Model at Work," European Journal of Political Research 31 (January 1997): 137.
3. Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
4. We will not delve here into the proliferating categories used to encapsulate Russia and many other countries that went through partial democratization during the "third wave," only to regress a few years later. Among the rubrics that have been applied to Russia recently are "managed democracy," "competitive authoritarianism," and the more familiar "delegative democracy."
5. Yeltsin avoided submitting the constitution to a proper referendum, which under Russian law would have needed to be endorsed by 50 percent of the entire electorate. The December 1993 vote, according to Yeltsin's decree, would be valid if turnout was 50 percent and half of those voting endorsed the initiative. In the end, only about one-third of all Russian citizens voted for Yeltsin's constitution.
6. Cindy Skach, Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15.
7. Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948).
8. On the relationship between semipresidentialism and constitutional dictatorship, see Cindy Skach, Borrowing Constitutional Designs, 12-30 and 49-70.
9. See Walter Bagehot The English Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; orig. publ. 1867).
10. Alexander M. Yakovlev, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 130. Yakovlev, a legal scholar and former legislator, was a key adviser to the committee that drafted the 1993 constitution. He later served as presidential plenipotentiary to the Federal Assembly.
11. On path dependence, see Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
12. Nor was the rivalry between executive and legislature the only salient division in the constitutional realm. The balance of power between the federal government and the regions was also hotly contested.
13. Using a modified version of Shugart and Carey's index of presidential power to compare these countries, France's president receives a score of 13, Weimar Germany's president receives a score of 17, and Russia's (1993) president receives a score of 26. In our counting, we have added emergency powers, which they do not include, but which we feel are crucial. See Mathew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Designs and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 150-155.
14. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
15. See the "Conclusions of the Presidency," European Council in Copenhagen Press Release, document DOC/93/3, 22 June 1993, which explicitly spells out the democratic criteria all potential EU members must satisfy before they can be admitted to the EU.
16. Cindy Skach's interview with President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Warsaw, Poland, 21 May 2001.
17. See the discussion of France's current constitutional difficulties, and the critique that its constitution is "ill adapted to the needs of a modern democracy," in Robert Graham's comment in Financial Times (London), 1 September 2004, 15.