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decentralized yet integrated party systems, with the pattern of competition promoting
mutual dependence and coalition building among regional and federal-level politicians.
Obviously, when the pattern of political competition is barely emerging at the start of a
democratic transition, it is highly uncertain whether party politics conducive to
maintaining territorial integrity will prevail.
The non-democratic alternative to sustaining federal stability is to restrict all
forms of political competition deemed to be potentially dangerous for territorial integrity.
Here, federal stability is preserved not because supporting the status-quo institutions is
the winning strategy in competitive elections, but because political competition is
restricted by the non-democratic (negative) means. The restrictions of this sort can be
made sufficient to prevent politicians from making federalism an electoral issue and from
challenging federal rules. Such restrictions on political competition are practically costly
and may not always be implementable, but if successfully imposed, could quickly restore
political stability and ensure territorial integrity. Such restrictions also threaten to spread
beyond affecting just the federal dimension and to all that might jeopardize the position
of the national incumbent.
Apparently, the current pattern of federal development in Russia is based on the
second model. Particularly since 2000, when, then newly elected, president Putin initiated
a set of federal reforms, the Russian government increasingly relies on the use of non-
competitive, non-democratic means of sustaining federal and territorial integrity. The
catch with this approach is that the non-competitive federal model may not be robust to
the re-opening of political competition, thus may not be possible as a temporary “fix” for
the federalism after which things would return back to normal.
Convention