+
2.5)
What are the sources and mechanisms of governance in Russia? Should bad governance be expected to persist endlessly under authoritarian rule, or can the quality of governance be improved over time by certain policies? The recent discussions attempting to explain good and bad governance in various countries, regions, and policy areas have been quite extensive.14 The question is: How can we place present-day Russia on this global governance map? Should we consider Russia to be an outlier or, rather, a laggard vis-à-vis many other developed and developing states?
Indeed, in 1984, a Financial Times journalist noted that Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union, should not be regarded as “Upper Volta with missiles.”15 However, such a statement soon lost its initial meaning of juxtaposition and instead became a sort of label for the country during the period of Soviet collapse. At that time, it sounded deliberatively offensive, and most probably unjust, given the fact that Upper Volta (renamed in 1984 to Burkina Faso) was one of the poorest African nations. Almost four decades later, however, this statement has, in a sense, proved to be correct. Judging by the data from the Rule of Law Index by the World Justice Project, the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International, and the World Bank’s Governance Matters, Russia has exhibited worse performance than Burkina Faso (still one of the poorest African nations) in five out of six key parameters of quality of governance (see table 1).
Table 1. Why Russia is Not Burkina Faso
Indexes
Russia
Burkina Faso
Rule of Law Index (World Justice Project), 2020
0.47 (rank 94 out of 128)
0.51 (rank 70 out of 128)
Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International), 2018
28 (rank 137 out of 180)
40 (rank 85 out of 180)
Rule of Law Index (World Bank), 2018
-0.82
-0.45
Regulatory Quality Index (World Bank), 2018
-0.54
-0.39
Government Effectiveness (World Bank), 2018
-0.06
-0.58
Control of Corruption (World Bank), 2018
-0.85
-0.11
Sources: World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 (Washington, DC: World Justice Project, 2020) https://worldjusticeproject.org/sites/default/files/documents/WJP-ROLI-2020-Online_0.pdf range from 0 (min) to 1 (max)
Corruption Perception Index (Berlin: Transparency International, 2020) https://www.transparency.org/cpi2019 range from 0 (min) to 100 (max)
Worldwide Governance Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020) http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/ range from -2.5 (min) to + 2.5 (max)
Although the validity of these and other cross-national rankings of states is the subject of numerous heated discussions,16 they may be used at least as a proxy for positioning certain countries on the global map of governance. While there is a high degree of correlation between the level of socioeconomic development (measured as GDP per capita) and the quality of governance in many countries, Russia seems to be an important, if not the only, major outlier from this tendency, especially regarding the rule of law and control of corruption, as figures 5 through 8 demonstrated.
This is why an in-depth focus on analysis of Russia’s “deviant case”17 may not only be useful for an understanding of the causes and effects of bad governance in this particular country, but also may shed some light on this phenomenon in a broader comparative perspective—which is essentially the goal of this book.
This introductory chapter is focused on setting the scene for the further exploration of issues of bad governance in Russia and beyond. After a short excursion to cover key concepts and definitions, it will explain the framework for analysis used in this book, present my main arguments, and outline the trajectory of bad governance in post-Communist Russia and its dynamics. The structure and contents of the following chapters will be briefly outlined in its concluding paragraphs.
FIGURE 5. GDP Per Capita and Rule of Law, 2018, World Bank (range from-2.5 to +2.5)
FIGURE 6
.
GDP
Per Capita and Control of Corruption, 2018, World Bank (range from-2.5 to
+
2.5)
FIGURE 7
.
GDP
Per Capita and Regulatory Quality, 2018, World Bank (range from-2.5 to
+
2.5)
FIGURE 8
.
GDP
Per Capita and Government Effectiveness, 2018, World Bank (range from-2.5 to
+
2.5)
What Is Bad Governance?
One influential political scientist has defined “governance” as the “government’s ability to make and enforce rules, and to deliver services, regardless as to whether that government is democratic or not.”18 From this viewpoint, governance as a category of analysis is different both from state capacity, which is related to the state’s coercive and infrastructural potential to implement certain policies, and from state autonomy, which is related to the ability of the state apparatus to adopt and implement policies irrespective of political influence. Explicitly or implicitly, such an approach lies behind numerous studies on the subject, both theoretically and comparatively oriented ones and those focused on particular countries, regions, and policy areas.19 Although the causes and mechanisms of bad governance have been analyzed by political scientists since the times of Machiavelli, modern discussions of this phenomenon are fueled not only by a major rise of scholarly interest in various aspects of governance20 but also by the emergence of new research tools and databases assembled by various institutions and teams of analysts.21 However, the very notion of “bad governance” has to a certain degree remained an elusive term, one constructed as an antonym to “good governance”; the latter, in turn, is also based on multidimensional criteria and lacks a universally accepted definition.22
The most widely used approach in the field is related to the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators program,23 where the understanding of good governance is based on six major pillars, or dimensions: (1) Voice and Accountability; (2) Political Stability and Absence of Violence; (3) Government Effectiveness; (4) Regulation Quality; (5) Rule of Law; and (6) Control of Corruption. While categories 1 and 2 relate to the quality of political regimes rather than to the quality of governance as such, the other four parameters, categories 3–6, establish the features of various dimensions of good governance. Scholars of the QoG Institute greatly expanded the understanding of good governance, adding to this list some other important dimensions of governance, such as accountability, efficiency, impartiality, and legitimacy, and employed this framework for analysis in several important scholarly contributions.24 However, such a comprehensive approach may contradict the good old Occam’s razor principle, or the law of parsimony, and go beyond necessity. This is why in this book I will mostly rely upon the minimalist definition of good governance offered by the World Bank because it better fits the purposes of my analysis. Thus, the four constituent elements of good governance are: effective government performance, decent regulatory quality of the state, adherence to the basic principles of the rule of law25 and political and institutional constraints on corruption.
If one perceives bad governance as an alternative juxtaposed to good governance in the manner of antinomy (such an analytic approach was, for example, employed in a recent study of Russian modernization26), then the key features of bad governance can be constructed as opposites of the principles of good governance in all of these four dimensions. Thus, bad governance can be understood as a combination of these attributes: (1) a lack of the rule of law and/or perversion of its basic principles; (2) a high degree of corruption, which penetrates all layers of governance; (3) a combination of high density, poor quality and selective implementation of state regulations (labeled here as the phenomenon of the “overregulated state”);27 and (4) general government ineffectiveness, except for certain crucial policy areas and/or priority projects and programs (often conducted under special conditions).