With The Regional Roots of Russia's Political Regime, William Reisinger and Bryon Moraski have made a very important contribution to how we understand both the origins and the current nature of the political regime in place in Russia. By showing us that Vladimir Putin's power was built on the foundations of the same regional political machines that it continues to depend on, the authors challenge widespread accounts that all one needs to know to understand Russian politics can be found inside the Kremlin or, even more specifically, in the person of Vladimir Putin.
The book's argument is based on exemplary social science research grounded in both deep knowledge of Russia's vast expanse and impressive skill in practicing cutting-edge statistical analysis. After laying out the central argument in a clear and compelling opening chapter, the authors begin their account with the best single summary I have seen of the first quarter century of Russian electoral politics, from 1991 to 2016. Packing a lot into just thirty-two pages without seeming crammed, this chapter in itself will be useful for students and anyone else looking for a concise account of the changes during this time in both the outcomes and practice of elections in Russia. This chapter nicely frames the central question of the book by documenting the increasingly authoritarian nature of electoral politics in Russia under Putin.
The remaining chapters report findings from a quantitative analysis of a great deal of original data, with each chapter peeling away another layer of the proverbial onion to reveal a deeper reality. Rather than recount exactly what each chapter does, I will instead describe some of the most interesting findings.
In line with the book's title, the authors show how Putin inherited a political system from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in which a relatively small number of regional political machines led by “governors” (or usually-directly-elected chief executives going by other titles) had developed the capacity to generate extraordinarily high turnout levels in elections and then to deliver these votes to whomever they pleased. If in the 1990s some of these machines were generators of opposition votes, Putin used a variety of carrots and sticks to turn them all to his side, making them in some sense the forward base from which his power would then expand still further as the 2000s progressed.
In this sense, Reisinger and Moraski show us that the authoritarian mechanisms that keep Putin in power today were not so much invented by him as initially corralled and then expanded by him. In a very interesting and novel spatial analysis, the book demonstrates that the process of expansion was not a vertical reception of Kremlin orders by regional bosses to construct their machines in certain ways according to a clear blueprint, but was instead a horizontal process by which political machine practices spread from region to region. All experiencing similar pressures to ramp up their vote delivery for the Kremlin, regions tended to learn from their immediate neighbors exactly how best to do it. Russia's political machines have thus tended to be spatially clustered, which interestingly also means that some larger areas (such as the northwest) have lagged behind in their capacity to deliver votes for the Kremlin.
Going even deeper, the book also uncovers particular features that make a given region more likely to be a major deliverer of pro-Kremlin votes. For many, the most unexpected finding will probably be that Putin's political machine has depended heavily on Russia's ethnic minority republics as well as on ordinary regions with higher non-Russian populations. This would seem to complicate simplistic notions one sometimes encounters that link Putin's domestic support to Russian ethnic nationalism, and calls attention to how important ethnic minority politics are in Russia today.
Implications for the future come from the facts that (a) this whole process has not been entirely orchestrated by the Kremlin and (b) it reflects a Kremlin adaptation to preexisting regional machine structures more than an integrated nationwide machine designed by the Kremlin itself. As the final line of the book reads, “the regime's reliance on informal political interdependencies with each of over four score regions may prove to be one of its weaknesses not the success story it had seemed to be” (213).
