Office or Officeholder? Regime Deinstitutionalization and Sources of Individual Political Influence

Abstract

How to separate the office from the officeholder is one of the most difficult questions in the empirical study of institutions and leadership. We argue that provided there is an indicator for the overall individual influence among members of the political elite and there is sufficient variability among individuals taking the same office, being promoted and demoted into different offices over time, we can separate latent individual and institutional components of influence at an aggregate, regime level. Our latent variable model thus provides a new tool to measure the degree of regime deinstitutionalisation.Using expert surveys that assess the ranking of the top political actors in Russia from 1994-2011, and restricting personal effects to those that are constant over time, we find that on average office dominates individual by the order of two. We discuss regime deinstitutionalisation in comparative perspective; demonstrate the generalisability by analysing Ukraine; account for patronage networks.Key Words: leadership, deinstitutionalisation, latent factor model, Russian and PostSoviet politics Does the political office that an individual occupies primarily determine one's overall political influence, or can the same office be strengthened or weakened depending on the officeholder? Recently, there has been a surge of scholarship that examined with new rigour whether leaders matter (e.g., Dewan and Myatt, 2008;Goemans and Chiozza, 2009;Horowitz and Stam, forthcoming;Jones and Olken, 2009). Nonetheless, it remains extremely difficult to attribute causality to particular officeholders, discern the effects of leaders from other factors, or disentangle the office from the individual officeholder (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011;Shamir, 2012;Sheffer, 1993). This paper directly confronts the empirical difficulty of separating the effects of leaders on policy, thereby addressing a centuries-old conundrum in political science. We do this through a novel measurement tool for the separation of different sources -or components -personal (officeholder) and institutional (office) -of the individual's influence. This approach largely permits us to side-step assumptions about the relative effects of individual traits, followers and contextual factors, and to identify the effects of leaders and institutions in a non-experimental setting. The expert survey we rely on provides one observed variable measuring the perceived policy influence for the most important actors within a political regime over time and thus the data itself cannot, at first sight, provide information on the relative importance of individual and office. 1 However, because over time different actors can hold the same office and the same actor can hold different offices, we can capture the corresponding changes in influence scores and use this variation to gauge the relative importance of the person and the office. We therefore measure, at an individual level, the relative attribution of influence to office and individual, and, at an aggregate level, the 1 An onl...

Cursus Honorum: Personal Background, Careers and Experience of Political Leaders in Democracy and Dictatorship—New Data and Analyses

“…4-5) has remarked, "the impact of leaders depends on the environment…some have even said that leaders are prisoners of that environment, in that they can do only what the environment 'allows' them to do." The first hurdle in examining leaders' effects therefore is to distinguish between leaders' own effects and those of the offices they occupy (Baturo & Elkink, 2014). Leaders' commands and policy preferences have also to be transmitted to, and implemented by their followers (Baturo & Mikhaylov, 2013).…”

Dynamics of regime personalization and patron–client networks in Russia, 1999–2014

“…The expert survey of political influence has been used extensively by Russian sociologists that analysed the composition of the political and economic elite (e.g., Kudeyarova, 1995;Kinsbursky, 2003;Kryshtanovskaya, 2002), and its validity has been extensively examined in Baturo and Elkink (2014). The restriction to one hundred individuals is somewhat arbitrary, however, this number is arguably a reasonable approximation of the subset of the key policy-makers in Russian politics that form the ruling, or winning, coalition: a subset of elite of sufficient size that its support "endows the leadership with political power" over the regime (Bueno de Mesquita et al, 2003, 51).…”

“…In Russia, in contrast to regimes in Central Asia and the Caucasus, where informal networks are largely based on ethnic or family ties (Collins, 2006), these networks are largely organised by a shared professional or educational background. In part, we know that the position in the informal elite network around the "patronal" president determines one's personal influence (Baturo and Elkink, 2014). Such informal networks can potentially be organised formally, so that the degree of affinity with the ruler can determine what formal political posts the individuals obtain.…”

“…Here we briefly explain the data on patronage. We employ and extend the data on patron-client networks in Russia from [1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014] sourced from various bibliographic data as explained in Baturo and Elkink (2014). We improve on and extend that data with additional data for the 2011-14 period.…”

“…The selection of the most important members of the Russian ruling coalition and the assessments of their individual political influence are based on exactly such expert survey, namely the 100 Most Influential (Leading) Politicians of Russia, conducted by the survey company Vox Populi together with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily, which assigns scores of influence over domestic and foreign politics and policy for the most important political actors in Russia. The indicator of the perceived individual influence is on the same scale for all individuals in the panel, includes a large number of individuals over time; the expert survey has been used in studies of political elite composition and regime deinstitutionalisation in Russia (Baturo and Elkink, 2014;Kudeyarova, 1995;Kinsbursky, 2003;Kryshtanovskaya, 2002).…”