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Prosecutors and Presidents in New Democracies: The Russia Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2017

SUN-WOO LEE  and
STEPHEN WHITE
SUN-WOO LEE
Affiliation:
Visiting Professor, College of Disciplinary Studies, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu, Republic of [email protected]
STEPHEN WHITE
Affiliation:
James Bryce Professor of Politics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article aims at an empirical verification of prosecutors’ partisan behavior through a case study based on the Russian President Yeltsin and Putin periods. According to Gretchen Helmke's original theory of strategic defection, dependent judges may occasionally check their principal, the executive leadership, by withdrawing their support in the course of an electoral cycle. However, a modified theory of strategic defection can be readily applied to civil-law prosecutors’ behavior in new presidential democracies, where several presidents dominated that office during most of their tenure but experienced prosecutorial defection in their final phase. Russia provides a textbook case for examining the modified theory in relation to prosecutors’ partisan behavior against an incumbent president. Meanwhile, this paper uses within-case analysis based on a qualitative method, because the methodological approach can have more advantages in discovering whether prosecutors acted ‘really’ strategically when an incumbent government was outgoing in Russia, and in further explaining a pattern of prosecutors’ partisan attitudes in new presidential democracies, through the modified version of Helmke's theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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