Borrowing institutions, which includes transferring advanced models and practices of governance, is faced with a process dubbed “bastardization.”84 Initially, this term was used to indicate the declining quality of goods produced in Russia using foreign technologies: domestic managers have few incentives to maintain quality control and often intentionally violate technological standards against the background of imperfect quality of corporate governance. Similarly, one might observe bastardization of transferred institutions by those actors who conduct their adoption and implementation in post-Soviet countries. To some extent, this process is inevitable, because the transfer of certain institutions would impose excessively high costs on mid-developed states (including post-Soviet countries). For example, the EGE in Russia is simultaneously used as a final test for school graduates and an entrance exam for universities, while in the United States and several other countries these two forms of tests are conducted separately. The adoption of a cheaper solution caused several problems in implementing the EGE.85 But more often the cause of bastardization reflects the “interests of those with the bargaining power to devise new rules.”86 The adaptation of borrowed institutions to Russia’s conditions is accompanied by their intentional and deliberate distortion by powerful actors interested in the preservation and strengthening of the informal institutional core of bad governance.
A typical example of bastardization of borrowed institutions is the experience of implementing the “open government” initiative in Russia under President Dmitry Medvedev. The idea of a more open and transparent government with active participation of ordinary citizens in policy discussions and the extensive use of modern information technologies was vigorously advocated by Medvedev’s team as a part of his political rhetoric of “virtual liberalization.”87 The Russian state designated special funding for these purposes, and a minister responsible for open government affairs was appointed to the cabinet.88 However, the mechanism was adopted from the Western practice of e-government, which implies the use of the Internet both for provision of state services and for feedback between citizens and the state (including civic legislative initiatives and the like). In the Western political context, e-government works as a complementary mechanism to democratic governance, an addition to free elections, independent media, rule of law, and so forth. In Russia, however, open government was designed as a substitutive mechanism of governance,89 and intended to work instead for these political institutions, which had been eliminated and/or weakened in the 2000s. From the viewpoint of governance in the West, e-government served as an additional tool that helped to increase the efficiency of the post-Weberian state apparatus. But in Russia, open government was considered a substitute for the administrative reform that had failed in the 2000s. This failure occurred not least because of the work of Medvedev himself, who had been responsible for overseeing it while he was serving in the presidential administration.90 It is no wonder that the early promises of open government remained largely unfulfilled; its role was limited to technological issues of the websites of state and municipal agencies and some opportunities for ordinary citizens to submit their letters of complaint via the Web. Open government has not empowered Russian citizens. They remain powerless petitioners, vis-à-vis state officials, who may or may not respond to these complaints at their own discretion. The final episode of bastardization of open government occurred in February 2015, when the Anti-Corruption Foundation (led by Alexei Navalny) proposed a legislative initiative on ratification of Article 20 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), which implied, inter alia, criminalization of illicit enrichment of state officials (Russian authorities had previously refused to ratify this part of the UNCAC). Navalny and his team gathered one hundred thousand signatures from Russian citizens via the Web, which was a mandatory condition for further inclusion of this citizen legislative initiative into the parliamentary agenda. But since this proposal was against the interests of Russia’s ruling group, the open government board (appointed by state officials) declined the legislative initiative using flimsy excuses.91 The ideas of openness, transparency, and civic activism became irrelevant in this case.
The other approach that aims to constrain the informal institutional core is purposeful cultivation of new norms, rules, and mechanisms of governance and their gradual extension to new areas and policy fields in order to develop new formal institutions. This approach includes not only promotion and advancement of spontaneously emerging good practices but also experimental establishment and embedding of new norms, rules, and mechanisms of governance by reformers who, in turn, are explicitly or implicitly backed by the political leadership. Since large-scale institutional changes are often countered both by the power vertical and by public opinion, the cultivation of institutions sometimes serves to prepare more fertile ground for certain policy innovations. In fact, the experimental nature of policy changes allows their details to be tested, thus averting the risks of full-scale institutional failures. From this viewpoint, cultivating new institutions is an appropriate technological solution that also makes it possible to overcome resistance to major policy reforms. But in most cases, failures to cultivate new institutions are caused by political rather than technological factors. Most large-scale institutional innovations are rather costly, face resistance from various rent-seekers and bureaucratic inertia, and also need public legitimation. The patronage of the top political leadership is necessary but often insufficient to accomplish these goals. This is why cultivating institutions is often accompanied by using special organizational devices, known in the Latin American context as “pockets of efficiency” (analyzed in chapter 6).92 Their essence is that the political leadership prioritizes a limited number of pet projects, which are implemented not within the framework of the power vertical hierarchy, but via deliberately created organizations and groups that enjoy exceptional official status and may operate beyond standard routines. Thanks to their relative autonomy and effective patronage, these organizations and groups may escape bureaucratic control, bear lower agency costs in comparison with their standard equivalents, and have more room for maneuver thanks to promises of breakthroughs. Sometimes these promises are fulfilled, but this whole venture is rather risky. In the context of Russian military history, the “Toy Army” of Peter the Great may be considered the closest equivalent to pockets of efficiency in the late seventeenth century: it served as a launching pad for a regular military establishment. The Soviet atomic bomb and space programs to a great degree relied upon special design bureaus (also known as sharashki), which may be regarded as the Stalinist version of pockets of efficiency.
Pockets of efficiency are short-lived because of the fortunes of the political leadership and its changing priorities and problems with continuity (outlined in a more detailed way in chapter 6). Even if pockets of efficiency perform well and accomplish their initial tasks, they rarely survive the subsequent routinization and the loss of exclusive status. At the same time, their good practices are often poorly diffused and may be rejected by other state agencies unless they are imposed top-down by the political leadership. Finally, the pockets are efficient precisely because of their relatively small size: when they begin to expand their scope and become “too big to fail,” they may face degradation because their modes of governance often copy the institutional core they aimed to combat. Often, the informal institutional core of bad governance is able to rebuild pockets of efficiency, rather than vice versa, and the potential incubators of new institutions may contribute to rent-seeking and serve the goals of the power vertical similarly to their predecessors.