Smyth 4 - PONARS Eurasia

Thief or Savior? Contesting Personalism in Russia’s Rallies and Protests

“Russia Without Putin!” Such battle cries by anti-regime protesters took sharp aim at a pillar of Russia’s electoral authoritarian regime: Vladimir Putin’s personalist link to voters. With chants of “Putin-Thief”…

A Well-Organized Plаy: Symbolic Politics and the Effect of the Pro-Putin Rallies

(Research Paper) (Co-authors: Anotn Sobolev and Irina V. Soboleva) This Higher School of Economics paper illustrates the government’s agility in response to opposition protests and the debacle of parliamentary…

Maintaining Control: Putin’s Strategy for Holding Power Past 2008

There is little question that Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is developing a strategy to preserve power beyond the 2007-2008 election cycle. There is also little question that neither his potential political rivals nor…

What Does Winning Mean in 2003?: A Candidate Centered Analysis of Upcoming Parliamentary Elections

In 1993, 1995, and 1999, analysts and politicians in both Russia and the United States made bold predictions about the outcomes of each national parliamentary election. Their predictions, based largely on the…

Putin’s Tightrope: Maintaining Support in the Face of Domestic and International Policy Demands

Watching President Vladimir Putin field the questions of high school students in Texas, that early assessments of Putin’s chances for a long political life and autonomous political action were extremely…

Power as Patronage: Russian Parties and Russian Democracy

"These elections are not about issues, they are about power." During the Russian parliamentary elections in December 1999 any number of people could claim this statement. This characterization–along with the…

Supporting Democratic Institutions Rather than ‘democrats’ in Russia

In the period leading up to Vladimir Putin's decisive victory in the first round of Russia's presidential election, individual personalities and not democratic institutions once more became the focus of…

The Role for US Democracy Assistance: Helping Build Parties from the Bottom Up

Despite the extraordinary development of the Russian political party system over the past ten years of political transition, parties themselves remain elite-dominated organizations with little connection to societal interests. This…

“Welcome to North Korea,” Predicting the Effect of Russia’s New Protest Law

On June 9, 2012 President Putin signed Federal Law 70631-6 «On Amendments to the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Violations» that enacted significant amendments to the legal…

The Audacity of Russia’s Voters

Elections were held in Russia last week for the lower house of the State Duma. Reports of election fraud as well as discontent with the current government led to…

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