Institutional Dynamics and Change in the Former Soviet Union

Abstract

Notwithstanding the many political similarities between post-Soviet states, the region has experienced numerous varieties of institutional design and political regime type since 1991. For scholars who work on the region, this high level of diversity and flux provides a rich set of cases for testing many of the comparative theories of institutional behaviour and change that feature in the study democratic and authoritarian political systems. This panel brings together several examples of this research. Focusing on institutional developments across the region, the papers seek to understand a number of institutional phenomena evident in the post-Soviet world. They include research on the legislative responsiveness of parties in Ukraine, which engages with an emerging literature on party development in presidential democracies (Samuels and Shugart, 2010), and on coalitional presidential regimes in particular (Chaisty, Cheeseman and Power, 2018). Two papers on Russia, which deal with questions of legislative scrutiny and presidential decree authority. One interrogates notions of ‘rubber stamp’ assemblies in authoritarian regimes and adds to a growing research on legislatures in non-democratic political systems (Truex, 2014); the other analyses executive decree authority in relation to work on bureaucratic capacity in the democratic presidential systems of Latin America (Inácio and Llanos, 2016; Polga‐Hecimovich and Trelles, 2016). And, research on constitutional change in the region, which addresses an important literature on the conditions under which authoritarian leaders seek to change the formal rules (Albertus and Menaldo, 2012). In exploring these questions, the panel will examine the ways in which post-Soviet regimes augment and/or challenge a comparative literature that has largely focused on cases from other regions of the world.