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A third,
structural, approach to explaining the lack of party development
devotes attention to the scale of socio-economic transformation in
Russia. This school attributes the lack of party development in
Russia to poorly defined socio-economic cleavages in Russian
society.
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Post-communist
transformations destroy old classes, create new interest groups, and
confuse almost everyone living through the transition. The slow
development of capitalism in Russia suggests that we should expect a
similarly slow formation of market-based interest groups. Russian
parties, in turn, have had difficulty in situating themselves on
programmatic or interest-based dimensions. For instance, Russia has
weak liberal parties, because Russia has a small and ill-defined
middle class.
Under these
circumstances, interest cleavages in the 1990s were fashioned more
by general attitudes about the transition, rather than by particular
economic or even ethnic concerns. In the 1990s political situations
and electoral choices were often polarized into two camps, those for
change and those against. More conventional cleavages that demarcate
the contours of stable party systems in other countries may perhaps
emerge only now that this polarization has begun to recede. This
approach offers important insights about party weakness in Russia
and predicts that party development will occur from the bottom-up.
Still others believe that the long shadow of an authoritarian past
and an unstructured post-Soviet society cannot be blamed entirely
for the lack of party development in Russia today. They emphasize a
causal relationship between individual choice and party development.
Specifically, Russian political elites made choices about the timing
of elections, the kind of electoral systems, and the relationship
between the president and parliament at the federal level and the
relationship among the heads of administration of local legislatures
at the regional level, all of which have impeded party development.
In other words, parties in Russia are weak because the most powerful
politicians in Russia have made choices to make them weak. Cultural,
historical, and socio-economic factors play a role in impeding party
development, but individual decisions – especially decisions about
institutional design – are the more salient causes of poor party
development.
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