From failed democratization to the war against Ukraine: what happened to Russian institutions under Putin?

Abstract

This literature review unpacks the state of the art in Russian studies regarding regime dynamics and the functioning of authoritarian institutions. It covers three major fields of scientific debate in the discipline: 1) the role of structural and agency-driven factors in explaining failed democratization and complete autocratization in Russia; 2) the conceptualization of the Russian regime between electoral authoritarianism and personalist rule; 3) the development of authoritarian institutions under Vladimir Putin and the process of institutional degradation. It also outlines the promising research avenues of studying Russian authoritarianism, which can be relevant not only for the scientific community but also for the practitioners, especially in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine.

Editorial: Foresight for democratising Russia

“…Any article has to include methodical discussions, and this editorial offers a very small assessment: While Russian propagandists often undertake morphological comparisons with earlier periods in Russian history (such as the ideologically biased identification of Smutnoye vremya, Смутное время, or time of troubles with the Yeltsin period [cf. Tucker, (2019), p.5]) or a blunt advocation of Kondratieff cycles, sober research tries to identify structural (Klimovich, 2023;Waller, 2023a;Dollbaum, 2023) framework conditions under which certain socio-political developments are more or less probable.…”