ABSTRACT
With the collapse of communism in the USSR in 1991, many assumed that the outcome of this process would be the emergence of democratic regimes on the territory of the former superpower. Instead, throughout much of this region, regimes have emerged that have had a distinctly non-democratic cast. These have ranged from the clearly authoritarian, like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, through to flawed democracies like Moldova and Ukraine. The largest successor state, Russia, remains short of the democratic ideal. It has become a classic case of a hybrid regime of the electoral or competitive authoritarian type (Levitsky & Way, 2010) where democratic forms are used to stabilize a non-democratic regime. Following the violent conclusion of the parliament-president dispute in 1993, democratic political forms have become embedded in the landscape, but they have lacked substantive democratic content. The system that emerged has generally been judged to be quite stable. However, this stability seemed to be called into question by the wave of protest following the December 2011 Duma election. This paper will argue that despite the challenge these public protests seemed to constitute to the stability and longevity of the hybrid Russian regime, a more potent challenge lies in the deficient performance of the central institutional form of that regime, the ruling party.
