ABSTRACT
Russia’s is an electoral political system biased towards authoritarianism. This chapter analyses the structural conditions of the political system and the major choices made by Russia’s political and economic elites over the last two decades. The Russian elite sees modernization narrowly as only improvement in economic and technological competitiveness. However, they avoid long-term commitment to modernization programmes because a concrete failure could lead to a crisis in the legitimacy. In this way, the elite is both a promoter of, and an obstacle to narrow modernization. Our analysis shows that the Russian system combines the risks of both democratic institutional forms and those of authoritarianism. The most important constraints of Russian modernization stem from a combination of authoritarianism and informal administrative practices.
