Russia’s Policy Environment
in
the
2000s: Institutions and Incentives
The influence of major political institutions such as the separation of powers and electoral and party systems on policy-making has been widely analyzed, but mostly focusing on democratic political regimes,5 while the effects of authoritarian political institutions on policy outcomes have been underexplored.6 Under authoritarianism, parliaments and political parties perform a secondary role in decision-making at best.7 The main policy-making agent is the government, which is appointed and controlled by the authoritarian leadership. In terms of institutional design, present-day Russia is a typical case of the “dual executive” within the framework of a presidential-parliamentary model.8 The Russian president, as a popularly elected head of state, can appoint and dismiss the cabinet as a whole as well as its individual members. Although the prime minister is approved by the State Duma, he is dependent on a president who can undo any of the prime minister’s decisions and can issue presidential decrees that the government must follow. Thus, the Russian institutional design intentionally ensures that the government hold a minimal level of autonomy and perform technical (rather than political) functions. Its role is reduced to implementing the tasks posed by the president and performing routine, daily administrative work in social and economic policy areas.9
This model of state governance, codified in the 1993 Constitution, was inherited from both the Soviet model (based on an informal division of labor between the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers) and the Russian Imperial model (based on the monarch’s control of both the royal court and the cabinet of ministers). From an authoritarian regime’s perspective, this model has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is the opportunity for the president to replace top officials if they are inefficient and/or politically disloyal, or if the president intends to change his policy. In addition, such a model allows shifting the responsibility for policy implementation and switching the blame to the government rather than the president (in the 1990s, Yeltsin used this method quite frequently, reshuffling his government several times). At the same time, citizens’ assessment of economic policy performance is an important source of mass support of political leaders;10 therefore the president is genuinely interested in successful government in terms of its performance. The problem is that the coexistence of the president with a capable and popular government can lead to an erosion of the presidential political monopoly; a successful prime minister can challenge the incumbent in the next electoral cycle as an opposition-backed candidate and/or a potential successor (as shown by the cases of Yevgeny Primakov in Russia and Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine).11 The combination of great managerial efficiency and unconditional personal loyalty to the boss is rare among top state officials. As a result, the rise of the principal-agent problem is deeply embedded in this model.
A low level of government autonomy leads to the transformation of the cabinet of ministers from a collective entity of key decision-makers to a technocratic set of officials responsible for implementing the commands of the president and/or prime minister. The president (or in some instances, prime minister)12 “hires” individuals for executive positions, considering them to be technocratic managers rather than politicians. Hence, the cabinet in this system of governance is neither a group of officials who are politically responsible before the parliament nor a team of professionals who share common policy goals and methods. The prime minister is responsible for coordinating this complicated web of relationships. He is dependent on numerous deputy prime ministers who supervise various state agencies (at times, there have been as many as ten of these deputy prime ministers in Russia). As a result, policy-making under these conditions turns into a complex and often inefficient series of bargains and ad hoc agreements between several state agencies. Top officials must spend countless resources to win intragovernmental struggles.13 This is why policy-making under these conditions is often perceived by observers as a difficult process.14
In Russia’s case, policy-making becomes even more complicated due to additional institutional flaws. First, the state agencies responsible for national defence, state security, and foreign affairs have been directly subordinated to the president since 1994 even though their chiefs are also members of the government and should be subordinated to the prime minister as well (later, other state agencies were also added to this list). Second, in order to resolve the principal-agent problem, presidential control has been imposed on the government; this role is performed by the presidential administration, directly subordinate to the head of the state (the Central Committee of the Communist Party performed the same function during the Soviet period). This model intentionally creates parallel governance structures that often compete during the policy process and therefore hinder decision-making.15 Third, the key ministers and/or deputy prime ministers who are personally linked to the president can influence major policy decisions, bypassing the web of agencies or even bypassing the prime minister. Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov (two first deputy prime ministers) in 1997–199816 and Aleksey Kudrin and German Gref (ministers of finance and of economic development, respectively) in 2000–200417 successfully employed this policy strategy. Finally, several presidential decrees are often prepared without the involvement of the governmental officials responsible for certain policy areas. As a result, these presidential decrees sometimes cannot be implemented properly. In addition to horizontal fragmentation (between governmental agencies and other federal executive offices), vertical fragmentation between the federal government and its branches at the subnational level also plays a significant role. In the 1990s, a full-scale decentralization of governance contributed to the capture of territorial branches of federal agencies by the regional elites. In the 2000s, a recentralization of state governance reestablished the federal center’s political control over regional authorities but did not establish a division of competences and resources between federal and regional governments. The shift to a hierarchical subordination of territorial governance exacerbated the agency problem in relationships between the center and the regions.18
Given these institutional arrangements, one might argue that the Russian executive, even in routine governance, must deal with aggravation of principal-agent problems in relations both between the president and the executive and within the government. This complicates the coordination of different state agencies and their actions and contributes to a protracted policy-making process and/or the making of inefficient decisions. Under these circumstances, the implementation of a full-scale reform program faces serious obstacles. Any bureaucracy is known to be interested in preserving the status quo.19 Russian political institutions are not capable of overcoming hidden resistance from bureaucrats, especially if and when policy-making requires interdepartmental coordination between different layers of the power vertical and numerous gates of the federal government. If reforms need concerted, large-scale, and highly coordinated action from various segments of the federal and regional bureaucracies, this becomes a major problem for policy changes. The lack of political accountability and the inefficiency of mechanisms of centralized control20 pushes officials to minimize their efforts to implement policy changes approved by the president. The more significant the involvement of the bureaucracy in policy implementation, the stronger the resistance it experiences from most officials. The policy reformers may be endorsed by a few ideologically driven proponents of these reforms and/or by policy entrepreneurs who expect to achieve personal gains from successful policy implementation.