Real‐world approximations of democracy, as Robert A. Dahl has incisively argued, are defined essentially by the presence of two things: inclusion of a majority of the adult population in political life and contestation among differing points of view in the public sphere.¹ Neither is sufficient to bring forth a democratic outcome in the absence of the other. Without the simultaneous involvement of ordinary people, openness of the governing elite to competition will produce a regime with some internal diversity yet no orderly feedback from popular preferences.² Without vigorous intra‐elite competition, high rates of grassroots participation breed merely the mute mobilization of compliant subjects in support of officialdom. The latter pattern reached its twentieth‐century apogee in the single‐candidate elections and other political rituals pioneered in Lenin's and Stalin's USSR and then exported to other Communist countries.³ ‘The USSR’, Dahl noted (writing in the 1970s), ‘still has almost no system of public contestation, though it does have universal suffrage’.⁴ The great reforms of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years took aim primarily at this second side of political organization. By eliminating the ruling Communist Party's monopoly on representation and allowing a multiplicity of parties, associations, and freelance politicians to take the stage, their authors seemed to have put Russia and its fellow post‐Soviet states squarely on the democratizing path.

It is hence especially painful to realize today, two decades after Mikhail Gorbachev so boldly inaugurated the transformation process, that Russia—not to mention its post‐Soviet neighbours in Eurasia—has significantly regressed and is by standard measures further removed from being governed democratically (p. 104 ) than it was at the beginning of the 1990s. Consider the widely cited scores generated by Freedom House, the human rights watchdog group based in New York. It rates countries for political rights and civil liberties on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being the most favourable score and 7 the least. In 1991, the year the USSR was disbanded and an independent Russian state was born, it assigned Russia 3 points on political rights and 3 on civil liberties; by 1999, the final year of Boris Yeltsin's presidency in Moscow, those indicators had worsened to 4 and 5; in 2003, several years into the tenure of Vladimir Putin, they stood at 5 and 5. In Freedom House's tripartite master classification, the new Russia in 1991 was ‘partly free’ but on the verge of being reckoned a ‘free’ polity; in 2003 Russia was still ‘partly free’ but now on the verge of dropping into the ‘not free’ category, where it would sit in the company of the central Asian nations and Alexander Lukashenko's dictatorship in Belarus.⁵

The Freedom House dimensions of political rights and civil liberties match up only imperfectly with Dahl's dimensions of inclusion and contestation.⁶ Possibly for that reason, and possibly for others, its monitors attribute a greater part of the decline of Russian democracy to the Yeltsin years, and a lesser part to Putin's incomplete reign, than I am inclined to do. Any assessment of the timing and substance of the shift would hinge on contestation, since, at least until recently, deterioration has been much more palpable by this touchstone than with respect to inclusion. In the electoral realm—the decisive one in most theories of democracy—few measures were taken until 2004, under either Yeltsin or Putin, to exclude the public from participation. Indeed, splashy Kremlin‐sponsored drives to maximize voter turnout have accompanied every national election campaign.⁷ De‐democratization in Russia has so far been principally a matter of encroachments on competition.

The Dwindling of Electoral Competition in Russia

Encroachments of what kind, exactly? Theorists of democracy tend to be preoccupied with formal political rights. On this plane, it would be inaccurate to say (p. 105 ) that political contestation has been systematically curtailed in post‐Soviet Russia. Legal and institutional curbs on the rights to organize and compete have been rare, even on the austere Putin's watch, and have mostly been limited to the rules covering the formation and accreditation of parties.⁸ Informal infringements on the pursuit of political points of view are more troubling. The most damaging have, of course, applied to the mass media, national television above all, and to the funding of opposition parties and non‐governmental organizations by members of Russia's emerging business elite.⁹ I am concerned in this chapter with behavioural manifestations of the attenuation of competition, manifestations we can reliably observe at the mass level but that ultimately are tied up with formal and informal changes at the elite level as well.

I confine myself here to electoral politics, and within it to presidential elections. Russia's autocratic heritage and presidentialist constitution make the election of a chief executive an incomparably more consequential event than the election of deputies to the relatively toothless State Duma, the lower house of parliament.¹⁰ Three presidential elections have been staged since the post‐Soviet constitution was ratified by referendum in 1993. Boris Yeltsin, who had initially been elected president in June 1991, when Russia (as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) was still a subordinate unit of the Soviet Union, won re‐election in a two‐round contest on 16 June and 3 July 1996. On 26 March 2000, his anointed successor, Vladimir Putin, already running as a quasi‐incumbent (in his last act as president on 31 December 1999, Yeltsin had appointed him prime minister and acting president), achieved a first four‐year term. On 14 March 2004, Putin won a second mandate.

The most straightforward indicator of the decline of competition in Russian politics is the proportion of the total vote secured by the winners in consecutive presidential races. In the qualifying round of the 1996 election, Yeltsin took 35.8 per cent of the votes tendered; in the run‐off, confronting the communist nominee, Gennady Zyuganov, he took 54.4 per cent. In 2000, Putin was to have a much easier time of it than Yeltsin had in 1996, garnering 52.9 per cent of the votes and prevailing in the first round. In 2004, Putin did better still, as his share of the vote swelled to 71.3 per cent.

The general trend, from more to less competition, is obvious. What needs to be underlined is the strength of the second phase of the trend, that is, the one (p. 106 ) bridging Putin's election in 2000 with his re‐election in 2004. When all is said and done, the presidential election of March 2000 was a respectably competitive one, albeit not nearly as competitive as the hard‐fought election of 1996. Putin faced a line‐up of ten opponents, the same number as his predecessor had faced in 1996, and three of them (Zyuganov, Grigory Yavlinsky, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky) were seasoned leaders of national parties who had been on the presidential ballot in 1996.¹¹ Putin was hard pressed in 2000 to make it over the 50 per cent line and escape an expensive run‐off battle.¹² The election of 2004 had a qualitatively different flavour. Facing only five opponents, none of whom was remotely a figure of major stature, Putin harvested almost three‐quarters of the votes cast. The 1996 election had been more competitive than the election of 1991, still under Soviet auspices, which Yeltsin had swept in a landslide. Yeltsin in the first round in 1996 attracted fewer votes (22.1 percentage points fewer, to be precise) than he had in 1991.¹³ The 2000 campaign was less competitive than the 1996 campaign, as Putin exceeded Yeltsin's percentage of the popular vote by a healthy 17.1 points. And by 2004 the degree of contestation was much less than at the outset. Putin succeeded in lifting his share at the ballot box by 18.4 percentage points, a bit of a wider gap than the one separating his 2000 performance from Yeltsin's in 1996.

Personality and Performance Explanations

What might lie behind this two‐step decrease of electoral competition in Russia? Post‐election surveys of eligible voters in 1996, 2000, and 2004 permit us to test some individual‐level explanations. I selectively target the discussion here on three of them.¹⁴

(p. 107 ) One superficially appealing interpretation would be to peg electoral results to the personal qualities of Yeltsin and Putin. Perhaps presidential elections have become more lopsided because Russian voters simply like Putin better than they liked Yeltsin and find him more palatable as a head of state. Anecdotally, there is much to recommend this approach. Yeltsin, already in his sixties when sworn in, could be a capricious decision‐maker, sometimes appeared out of his depth in shaping policy and representing Russia in international affairs, showed an inordinate fondness for vodka, and was often ill or indisposed, spending much of his second term shuttling in and out of hospital and rehabilitation facilities. Twenty‐one years younger than Yeltsin, Putin is steady at the helm, a teetotaler, and a physical fitness buff and workaholic. Putin, Russians will volunteer in conversation, is somehow more presentable, more ‘cultured’, and more ‘presidential’ than Yeltsin and arouses greater confidence in his ability to lead wisely.

Survey data provide harder evidence of the relevance of the personality factor. Table 6.1 summarizes how Russian citizens rated and ranked incumbents in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections. They were asked to assess the incumbents and several of their campaign rivals on four generic character traits often screened for in such surveys. The queries were couched in affirmatory language about intelligence (was the candidate ‘an intelligent and knowledgeable person’?); strength (‘a strong leader’?); integrity (‘an honest and trustworthy person’?); and empathy (‘really cares about the interests of people like you’?). Respondents answered whether the candidate definitely had, probably had, probably lacked, or definitely lacked the specified quality.¹⁵

As can be seen, Boris Yeltsin as a person was not treated tenderly by his compatriots in the 1996 poll. Only on the intelligence scale did positive answers outnumber negative answers; on integrity and more forcefully on empathy, negatives outnumbered positives; on strength, positive and negative responses came out equal. Yeltsin fared miserably in relation to his opposition, ranking fourth of the five candidates inquired about on intelligence, integrity, and empathy, and third on strength. General Alexander Lebed, the flamboyant paratroop commander and hero of the Russian intervention in the republic of Moldova, who finished third in the vote count in round one, was ranked first on all four facets of personality save none. On an average, the runner‐up, Gennady Zyuganov, ranked second on the personality assessments, while Grigory Yavlinsky, who came in fourth in the election, ranked third. Only the fifth‐finishing Vladimir Zhirinovsky was afforded a worse character reference than Yeltsin by our survey respondents.¹⁶

(p. 108 )

In 2000, though, Vladimir Putin was to receive rave reviews from the citizenry. Positive responses outweighed negative responses on all four character traits, by margins ranging from 50 percentage points (for empathy) to a massive 90 points (for intelligence). Moreover, Putin was placed a resounding first on all criteria, easily outstripping the three other candidates about whom we posed the questions. In 2004, the picture had become even rosier for Putin. On every score, the percentage of positive evaluations rose and the percentage of negative evaluations fell. (p. 109 ) Putin dominated the field of candidates in still more decisive fashion than in 2000. For both 2000 and 2004, the contrast with Yeltsin in 1996 could hardly be starker.

The Russian public's appreciation of Putin, when juxtaposed to its censorious view of Yeltsin, may well have helped drive the jump in the incumbent's vote share between 1996 and 2000, and along with that the diminution in electoral competition over the four‐year span. But the personality factor provides little if any analytical purchase over the no less salient swing in the electorate's mood in the next four‐year span, from 2000 to 2004. Only in a minor way were assessments of Putin's character more flattering in 2004 than they had been in 2000. The raw numbers imply that those assessments were already starting from such an elevated plateau that there was precious little room for upward movement. Those assessments cannot be the chief reason for the exaggerated shift toward Putin, and away from robust political competition, witnessed in the 2004 election.

A second promising line of inquiry fastens on incumbents' performance in office, as distinct from their characteristics as human beings. Yeltsin in 1996 had been president of Russia for five years. Putin in 2000 had been head of government for seven and half months and acting head of state for three months, and as of the 2004 election he had occupied the office of president for a full four‐year term. Quite separate from what they knew about the two men's personal attributes and styles, citizens accordingly had plenty of retrospective information about the two men's actions in government, information which one would presume would have had an impact on people's voting choices. Yeltsin had a crucial part in the breakup of the Soviet Union, had weathered a constitutional confrontation in 1993, and had launched radical market reform of the planned economy. Putin in 2000 had tinkered with social policy and taken command of the second Chechen war; by 2004, he had made a multitude of decisions extending and rejecting aspects of the Yeltsin legacy. Voters were free to reward incumbents for decisions they favoured and punish them for decisions they opposed.

Popular assessments of the work of Yeltsin and Putin are laid out in Table 6.2. The overall Gestalt is not so different from the character assessments encapsulated in Table 6.1. The survey question reported on here asked respondents to evaluate the incumbent's ‘activity’ (deyatel'nost) in his high office, that office being president for Yeltsin in 1996 and Putin in 2004 and prime minister and acting president for Putin in 2000. The evaluation was on a five‐point scale stretching from strong disapproval to strong approval, with a neutral category in the middle. The modal response for Russia's first president in 1996, furnished by half the respondents, was the non‐committal middle category; outside that range, negative evaluations of his activity overshadowed positive evaluations by about three to one. For Putin in 2000, the modal response to his record as interim leader of the country is qualified approval, and positive assessments are about ten times as plentiful as negative assessments. His profile in 2004 is similar, with a barely detectable loss of lustre. The modal response (by a tiny, statistically insignificant amount) is the neutral one; as in 2000, positive evaluations of Putin's (p. 110 )

As with the personality factor, retrospective evaluations of incumbents' records aid us some in understanding the trend toward presidential dominance of the electoral arena, and yet are by no means the whole answer. Again, the pronounced pro‐Kremlin shift in citizen sentiment from 1996 to 2000 is entirely consistent with Putin's electoral success in 2000. Russian voters were as likely to see Putin as an improvement on Yeltsin in policy and performance terms as in personality terms. But this same variable is of no utility in ferreting out why Putin was so much more proficient a vote‐getter in 2004 than he had been in his maiden election in 2000. If anything, grassroots perceptions of Putin's record were a tad less enthusiastic in 2004 than they had been four years before. They had more room to grow in a positive direction than the extremely favourable take on Putin's personal traits, and that growth did not take place. Logically, then, mass evaluations of Putin's past presidential performance are not the key to comprehending the leap in his electoral support—and the thinning out of democratic competition—between 2000 and 2004.

Filling the President's Shoes

If personality and past performance do not satisfactorily account for the recent decline in electoral contestation in Russia, then what else might? I believe there is leverage to be gained by focusing on a third candidate‐centred variable, namely, the public's anticipation of the future activity of the candidates. My guiding assumption is that Russians, like many citizens in consolidated democracies, are sensitive to what they feel potential officeholders will do with power after the ballots have been tallied. Students of presidential elections in the United States have learned much from survey questions that refer implicitly, and sometimes very explicitly, to campaign promises with emphases that have varied from domain to domain as candidates try to match their own credibility against the (p. 111 ) opponent's weaknesses.¹⁷ The citizen's willingness to identify one candidate or another as best prepared to cope with a certain issue is often predictive of a tendency to vote for that candidate. Russian elections are unlike American elections in numerous regards, but the tendency to link voting choice with expected behaviour in office is universal enough that it should in principle be operative.

Beginning in 1996, my research collaborators and I have put to our survey respondents a series of expected‐performance questions. Shown a list of presidential nominees, the individual respondent was invited to volunteer which candidate ‘could handle better than the others' (smog by luchshe drugikh spravit'sya s) a set of policy problems, described one by one. The grab bag of problems probed for altered slightly from election to election. Identically or similarly worded question items about economic policy, crime and corruption, human rights and democracy, and foreign policy appeared on all the questionnaires; the 1996 item about unemployment was broadened out to social security in 2000 and 2004; a query about Chechnya in 1996 and 2000 was rephrased to aim at terrorism in 2004; and an item on social stability was administered in 1996 only and not repeated. The body of each question item expressly gave the respondent the option of replying that there was ‘no special difference’ (net osoboi raznitsy) among the candidates as to capacity for dealing with the problem.

In the 1996 election, as is nicely brought out in Table 6.3, President Yeltsin had as much difficulty distinguishing himself in the electorate's eyes as a future problem solver as he had selling his unique personality and his demonstrated record in power. Across all seven policy areas, the size of the group willing to say Yeltsin was the candidate best prepared to handle the issue averaged just 13 per cent among all those polled, and 24 per cent among those able to finger a candidate. In but two issue areas (democracy and foreign policy) did the incumbent lead the field; he limped in fourth on a pair of issues, third on two, and second on one. The formidable General Lebed was ranked top in three areas (crime and corruption, Chechnya, and social stability), with truly spectacular evaluations for the war in Chechnya (74 per cent of all who named a candidate) and crime and corruption (77 per cent). The Communist Gennady Zyuganov was judged most proficient in two areas (the economy and unemployment).¹⁸

By 2000, there had been a sea change. Pluralities of Russians felt acting president Putin to be best qualified to handle three of six problems on the issue, and majorities gauged him best on the remaining three, for an average of 46 per cent across the issue areas, and 61 per cent among persons able to identify a candidate as competent. Unlike personality and retrospective evaluations, which (p. 112 )

Table 6.4 fills in important details on the electorate's perceptions of issue competence. Column 1 repeats the first column in Table 6.3, reciting the percentages considering the incumbent, be it Yeltsin or Putin, the best able to handle the given issue. Columns 2–4 set down the alternatives to siding with the man in the Kremlin: giving the nod to an opposition candidate, detecting no difference to speak of between the candidates, and not being able to express an opinion about who would acquit himself best.

(p. 113 ) The story Table 6.4 tells is a fascinating and depressing one. In the first presidential election of the post‐Soviet era, in 1996, fewer than 15 per cent of Russian electors on average discerned the incumbent president, Yeltsin, as having the answers to the country's most pressing problems; almost one in two, from problem to problem, found an opposition candidate to be best qualified; and about 40 per cent had an indifference response (seeing no special difference or not knowing what to answer). In 2000, pro‐incumbent responses have come to eclipse pro‐opposition candidate responses by more than 20 percentage points, and the number of indifference responses is down to one quarter of the electorate. In 2004, there are two striking departures in the array of responses. One is that, as never before, an absolute majority of Russians (59 per cent of our sample) held the

We are confronted here, as much as anything, by Russians' progressive loss of the ability to imagine anyone other than the incumbent as up to the task of filling the president's shoes. This diminution has been accompanied by a gradual decline in the quality—visibility, prior high‐level experience, standing in the political elite—of the challengers to the status quo. Putin won re‐election in March 2004 against the Russian equivalent of five Ralph Naders. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation nominated the chairman of the Party's agrarian wing (Nikolay Kharitonov), whose stodgy persona was guaranteed to turn off urban voters. Two candidates (Sergey Glazyev and Irina Khakamada) were independents who headed factions within opposition parties, and another (Sergey Mironov) led a boutique party and actually endorsed President Putin. The final candidate (Oleg Malyshkin) was nominated by Zhirinovsky's Liberal‐Democratic Party of Russia but had made his reputation within the party as its chief bodyguard. In the run‐up to election day, I did not hear a single pundit, Russian or foreign, express doubt that Putin would roll to victory. The only question beforehand was the size of his majority. One reason for Putin's having to contend with so lightweight a slate of rivals was that more mainstream and more credible political personalities refused to let their names stand, certain that they would be humiliated at the polls and fearful in some cases that they might face non‐electoral consequences to boot.¹⁹ The result is a vicious circle. Russians are deeply skeptical of opposition candidates; this keeps non‐Naderesque politicians out of the electoral arena; and the paucity of serious candidates in turn deepens public apathy.

Surprisingly, most Russians were not able to imagine alternatives to President Putin in the 2004 election even when they were critical of elements of his government's performance. Table 6.5 helps tease out this association. It breaks down prospective evaluations on two of our six issue clusters, crime and corruption and terrorism, by assessment of trends in the interval since the 2000 election. The trends were elicited in four discrete areas: crime, corruption, terrorism, and the Chechen war. In each area, the telling point is made in the first row, the one giving evaluations of issue competence for individuals who thought the national trend since 2004 was negative. Compared to citizens who felt that crime was (p. 115 )

Prospects

It is enticing to impute the attenuation of political contestation to some timeless strand in Russian political culture. But drawing such a connection would be unpersuasive. Culture is supposed to be more or less invariant, and the climate of politics in Russia, however determined, was permissive and in fact encouraging of electoral and political controversy from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.

The most plausible culprits in the attenuation of Russian democracy, as evinced in the withering of competition in the electoral sphere, are twofold. The first is the failure of parties with some meaningful autonomy from government to ensconce themselves as the definitive structuring forces in mass politics. Yeltsin's staunch refusal to found a pro‐reform, pro‐presidential party when Russian politics was at its most open and idea‐infused is as responsible as anything for this omission, and the error limited his options in choosing an heir in 1999. His pick, Putin, was plucked from the most ingrown and secretive segment of the Russian bureaucracy, the national security establishment. Once confirmed by the electorate, Putin sponsored United Russia, a top‐down ‘party of power’ bereft of any vision of the future other than glorifying the current leader and buttressing the prerogatives of officials in the central executive agencies, a notion marketed under the slogan of ‘strengthening the state’. He wedded this innovation to a second move—the abridgment of public discourse. In swift and ruthless strokes, Putin and his allies rescinded the editorial freedoms of state‐owned media outlets and employed financial and administrative clout to hedge in and cow most of the privately‐owned media. When the president sought a public mandate for his second term, there thus were neither effective non‐state‐dependent parties to put forward a credible alternative to him nor communication channels able and willing to carry a dissenting message. His victory in March 2004 was as close to preordained as any election could be, short of reversion to the single‐candidate charades of Soviet days.

In light of these origins, the prospects for the attenuation of democratic contestation being reversed any time soon are dim. Symbiosis of the upper echelons of the governing elite with United Russia will continue to grow throughout Putin's tenure, as will the effort to continue the Naderization of the opposition. It is hard to believe that the leash on the mass media will be loosened, either. The impetus for changing the status quo, therefore, will have to come from elsewhere, if anywhere. A catastrophic failure—in foreign policy (the ‘loss’ of Ukraine to NATO and the European Union, for instance), in the economy (p. 117 ) (maybe due to a slide in world oil prices), in the shaky security environment of the North Caucasus, in some spectacular act of terrorism in Moscow or St Petersburg—might encourage Russians to imagine some other kind of person leading them in future. At the same time, disaster would also tempt those in charge to try abrogating both mass inclusion in politics and all semblance of contestation in the name of saving the nation. A less fanciful source of disruption would be the arrival of a new supreme leader, should Putin and his inner circle consent to a passing of the baton later in the decade. All three incoming leaders of Russia since 1985—Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin—have to varying extent repudiated and refashioned the works of their predecessors. It says something about the blunting of political reform that the brightest hope for resuming its forward progress may lie in the urge of one man in a high and lonely place, as yet unknown, to make history by doing the right thing for his society. (p. 118 )