State capacity and regime resilience in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

Vladimir Putin’s state-building project, which has included a ‘war on the oligarchs’, the reining in of regional power, the co-optation or marginalization of civil society and political opposition, and the establishment of a ‘power vertical’, has not been based on state strengthening but has had much more to do with regime consolidation. It is argued that, in the Russian case, the building of state capacity may not be a crucial factor in determining the medium or even the long-term survival of the authoritarian system. Although Russia has relatively weak state capacity, the Putin regime has remained stable. The regime’s resilience is built on the distribution of rents among political and economic elites, the provision of social welfare, the coercion or co-opting of civil society and political opposition, and the mobilization of public support through the provision of economic benefits and national-patriotic appeal.

From Offsetting to Emulation: A Neoclassical Realist Analysis of Russia’s Internal Balancing Strategies

“…This analysis uses a definition of state capacity based on three dimensions: i) extractive capacity; ii) coercive capacity and; iii) administrative capacity (Hanson 2017;White 2018). These dimensions provide a basis for the functioning of the modern state insofar as "any state first and fundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys these to create and support coercive and administrative organizations" (Skocpol 1979, 42).…”

“…In this sense, after Putin's two presidential terms, the Russian state was no longer as weak as it had been with Yeltsin (Easter 2012;Taylor 2011). This is because it now had enough capacity to maintain a sizable coercive apparatus and extract resources from the oil and gas sector despite some limitations (White 2018).…”

Policy implications of climate change denial: Content analysis of Russian national and regional news media

“…A short period of administrative autonomy in the regions followed the collapse of Communism, but in the 2000s the vertical political relationship with the state was restored in a unitary model of personalized relations between the Putin administration and regional authorities (Sakwa, 2016). Subsequently, one central source of the system’s stability and resilience has been ‘the extraction and redistribution of rents from the oil and gas sector’ (White, 2018: 141). In contrast to Soviet times, the fossil-fuel industry has also become a major business that draws international investors, competes for global markets and depends on international climate mitigation incentives.…”

Resilience and the world order: the EU and the RIC states

“… 3 For example, in the case of Russia, President Putin has primarily referred to the country’s resilience towards the sanctions imposed by the West (Guter-Sandu and Kuznetsova 2020 ), the broader challenges of the EU and US in the post-Soviet space (CAN 2020 ; White 2018 ) or more recently fluctuations in oil prices (Weltman 2020 ). For Indian Prime Minister Modi, the need to enhance resilience has been articulated in relation to potential economic crises (FE Bureau 2019 ), the range of values that it seeks to promote in the world order (Xavier 2020 ), and more recently the supply of utilities during the coronavirus crisis (All India 2020 ).…”