Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine

A. Main Hypotheses of Relevance to PDT

Applicability

Ukraine and Moldova are less likely to undergo autocratic consolidation and therefore, may be more likely to undergo democratic consolidation. Way raises the question about whether ethno-federalism is necessarily a hindrance towards democracy building, though he does note that if there are several anti-incumbent national identities competing against one another, incumbent consolidation is more difficult. Presumably, this is the case regardless of whether consolidation is autocratic or democratic.

Political Institutions

Political institutions do not matter as much as the incumbent’s ability to consolidate political power and the strength of anti-incumbent nationalism. This is demonstrated by the fact that in Russia, President Putin has been able to make the parliament almost entirely dependent on him, while in Moldova the parliament passed a constitutional amendment making the presidency a parliamentary appointment rather than being decided through popular elections.

Parties

Strong parties act not only to consolidate democracy, but also to consolidate autocracy. Parties can be the mechanism by which incumbents preserve elite unity, and by which they organize electoral fraud and control the media.

Ethno-Federalism

Anti-incumbent nationalism plays a key role in consolidating and strengthening the opposition and keeping it focused over a long period of time. If there is more than one identity around which to organize, victorious opposition parties could face a new anti-incumbent nationalist backlash and may never succeed in consolidating their regime.

Mass Movements

Mass protests that are spurred by anti-incumbent national identity can often have a large effect on weakly consolidated incumbents, as witnessed in Georgia where the number of protestors was only about 20,000-40,000 people. However, in the face of a strong state and weak anti-incumbent national identity, demonstrations have little effect, as witnessed in Belarus.

Civil Society

Early political competitiveness in the four countries in question was not rooted in strong civil society, but rather in the weakness of incumbents to consolidate power. Way believes that the primary causes of mass mobilization like the kind observed in Ukraine has more to do with a strong anti-incumbent national identity than with the relative strength or weakness of civil society.

Economic Institutions

Way suggests that autocratic incumbents can achieve “greater regime closure…by… reasserting (Russia) the de facto scope of state power of economic actors” (233).

Reliance on high-value raw materials

Autocratic incumbents can use rents gained from high-value raw materials to “pay salaries and/or co-opt potential sources of opposition through patronage” (235).

Leadership

The ability of incumbents to develop know-how in constructing authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet context is important for regime longevity. “The post-cold war environment created fundamentally new challenges for autocrats who had almost never faced open internal opposition and who were accustomed to the extensive assistance of external patrons. Leaders finding themselves in this next context had to learn how to use existing resources to compete in semicompetitive environments, to keep allies in line, and to coerce opposition without provoking international reaction” (236).

External Factors

Way suggests that new autocratic incumbents have to act more carefully in oppressing opposition forces in order to avoid an international reaction. He also criticizes scholars for looking at everything through the lens of democracy building, and missing the fact that what may look like strengthened democracy is in fact a weakened autocracy that could grow stronger as incumbents acquire know-how, build elite unity, consolidate state power and control media more effectively.

B. Article Summary

Way’s basic argument is that scholars have misconstrued some of the transitions that have occurred in the former Soviet Union as transitional democracies, whereas in fact they were or remain weak autocracies. Way’s project is to examine the emerging conditions in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, and to understand why “all four countries were relatively open in the early 1990s despite the presence of key obstacles but became more closed over time… [and] why by the beginning of the twenty-first century… the countries emerge[d] with different levels of competitiveness” (231-32).

Main Hypothesis. “Competitive politics were rooted much less in robust civil societies, strong democratic institutions, or democratic leadership than in the inability of incumbents to maintain power or concentrate political control by preserving elite unity, controlling elections and media, and/or using force against opponents… such failure to consolidate political control has been an outgrowth of strong anti-incumbent national identity and/or incumbent weakness as defined by a lack of know-how, ineffective elite organization, and/or the weakness of key dimensions of state power” (232).

Conclusion. The differences between the four cases can be explained almost entirely by the degree to which incumbents were able to strengthen their capacity as described above and the level of anti-incumbent national identity that existed within each country. Thus, Ukraine, which is strongly divided between a Ukrainian and a Russian national identity, and Moldova, which is divided along Romanian, Russian, and Moldavian national identities has weaker and less consolidated autocratic/more open regimes than Belarus and Russia, where anti-incumbent nationalism is weak.

C. Comments

Way’s broad analysis of the dynamic between incumbent and anti-incumbent forces provides some important insights, highlighting the prominence of state capacity and nationalism in relation to the possibility of regime change.

Summarized by Artyom Matusov, 07/10/06)