(Page 1 of 15) - Partisanship in Transition: The Case of the Russian Federation 1995-2004 authored by Hale, Henry. and Colton, Timothy.

PARTISANSHIP IN TRANSITION:

THE CASE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION 1995-2004

Timothy J. Colton, Harvard University, ## email not listed ##

Henry E. Hale, George Washington University, ## email not listed ##

Prepared for delivery at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,

September 1-4, 2005. Copyright by the American Political Science Association.

Rarely does the social science community concur so completely on an important issue as

it has done on the relationship between democracy and political parties. Democracy in a large-
scale political community, the consensus holds, is “unimaginable” (Weber 1946), “unthinkable”
(Schattschneider 1942), and “unworkable” (Aldrich 1995) without political parties, which are
therefore held to be “indispensable” (Lipset 1959, 2000) to democratic government. With
democratic institutions having been substantially subverted in the Russian Federation under
presidents Boris Yeltsin and, especially, Vladimir Putin, one might suppose that problems with
Russia’s party system during the initial years of democratization might have facilitated this
process of subversion.

One feature held by theorists to lie at the heart of a party system’s strength is the concept

of partisanship – individual voter loyalties to particular parties. Such loyalties, when existing for
more than one party in substantial numbers, help form an important barrier to anti-democratic
backsliding since they create hard cores of opposition to any such moves that might be
perpetrated by opposing parties. They are also said to add stability to the democratic process,
averting wild swings in party performance that can confuse other voters, cause potentially
dangerous lurches in policy, and decrease long-term political predictability, which encourages
investment and hence economic growth. If a country does not display robustly developing
partisanship, therefore, one would be on firm scholarly ground to doubt the near-term stability of
democratic consolidation in that country.

There is no agreement in the comparative literature, however, on how partisanship comes

to develop in a transitional country. For one thing, scholars differ widely on their interpretation
of precisely what partisanship is, with some seeing it as a psychological attachment and others
characterizing it as a more rational calculation of long-term party performance and capabilities.
These rival theories have very different implications for how partisanship can be expected to
emerge. Another difficulty has been in the nature of preexisting empirical studies of the subject.
Not a single study of any country has surveyed the same individuals about their partisan
attachments over the course of a major partisan realignment, not to mention a period of initial
party-system formation (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002: 194). Chances to harvest such
data are exceptionally rare because they hinge on historic accident and on the forethought or
good luck of being able to do survey research at the right moment. This has left us unable to

This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Funds from the

National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) (under authority of a Title VIII grant from
the U.S. Department of State), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and from the U.S. Department of State also
supported work leading to this article. The statements made and views expressed within this text are solely the
responsibility of the authors. They are grateful to all whose support made this project possible. Support for the
collection of the data from 1995, 1996, and 2000 is described in Colton and McFaul 2003.

On democratic consolidation, see Hanson 2001.