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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Stephen Kotkin is surely right that Russia cannot be understood fully through the lens of its elections and that it is conceptually risky for political scientists to treat U.S. democracy as its analytical point of departure. He also makes a good point that governance, institutional quality, and actual state performance need to be studied along with civil society and political parties.
Fortunately, today's field of political science offers a wide range of works that agree. Without producing a long bibliography, we might mention Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's and Daniel Treisman's recent books on center-periphery relations and governance; Maria Popova's and Peter H. Solomon's research into the Russian judiciary; Lucan Way's study of the institutional underpinnings of authoritarianism; and lively debates on the state's management of the economy and its ability to provide social services.
1. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, , Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Treisman, Daniel, The Architecture of Government: RethinkingPoliticalDecentralization (Cambridge, Eng., 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Popova, Maria, “Watchdogs or Attack Dogs? The Role of die Russian Courts and the Central Election Commission in die Resolution of Electoral Disputes,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 3 (May 2006): 391–414 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peter H., SolomonJr., “Assessing die Courts in Russia: Parameters of Progress under Putin,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 16, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 63–73 Google Scholar. Way, Lucan, “Audioritarian State Building and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine,” World Politics 57, no. 2 (January 2005): 231-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For examples of these lively debates, see Barnes, Andrew Scott, Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms, and Power (Idiaca, 2006)Google Scholar; Luong, Pauline Jones and Weindial, Erika, “Contra Coercion: Russian Tax Reform, Exogenous Shocks, and Negotiated Institutional Change,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (January 2004): 139-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Linda J. Cook, “State Capacity and Pension Provision,” Gerald Easter, “Building Fiscal Capacity,” and Frye, Timothy, “Governing the Banking Sector,” all in Colton, Timodiy J. and Holmes, Stephen, eds., The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia (Lanham, Md., 2006)Google Scholar.
2. E.g., Jessica, Allina-Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge, Eng., 2007)Google Scholar.
3. Wilson, Andrew, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, 2005)Google Scholar.
4. Linz, Juan J., “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3, Macropolitical Theory (Reading, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar.
