ABSTRACT
This paper compares the regimes of Turkey and Russia and how state capacity has facilitated authoritarian regime building at the expense of democratic consolidation. It begins by considering how best to conceptualize the Putin and Erdoğan regimes. Whilst recognizing significant differences between the two cases, we argue that the concepts of electoral authoritarianism and neopatrimonialism are particularly helpful in better understanding how both systems operate. The paper then discusses the concept of state capacity, arguing that for conceptual clarity a parsimonious understanding of the concept based on the state’s extractive, administrative and coercive capacities, provides the most useful framework for the comparative analysis. The paper concludes that in Turkey the shift towards electoral authoritarianism since 2010/11 has happened in a much shorter time span, is more conflictual and characterized by more elite and social contention than in Russia under Putin. The Putinist regime was more capable of harnessing the infrastructural and coercive capacity of the Russian state to institute a stable neopatrimonial authoritarian regime that functions in a setting of electoral authoritarianism. In both cases, authoritarian regime building came at the expense of or supplanted efforts to improve and expand state capacity for effective democratic governance.
