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Rationality, Structure, and Agency in Post-Soviet Russian Democratization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2007

Stephen E. Hanson
Stephen E. Hanson
Affiliation:
University of Washington and the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies
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Extract

Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and autocracy more generally. While the decade and a half since the Soviet collapse has been a time of massive upheaval and hardship for the hundreds of millions of people living in the region, it has also been something of a golden era for the study of comparative politics—as anyone who reads the works reviewed here will readily attest.Stephen E. Hanson is Boeing International Professor at the University of Washington and the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, winner of the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, and the author of numerous journal articles examining post-communist politics in comparative perspective.

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 793 - 802
Copyright
© 2007 American Political Science Association

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