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Seongcheol Kim discusses his latest Journal of Language and Politics article 'The (anti-)political logic of authoritarian institutionalism: Party politics and authoritarian consolidation in Russia', considering its relevance for current events.
This is where I see the value of authoritarian institutionalism as a concept: it captures a constitutive face of authoritarianism that often gets lost when scholars of various stripes rush to equate populism with authoritarianism.
The topic of your article is “authoritarian institutionalism.” How do you understand this term?
I begin with a reading of how Laclau uses the term “institutionalism” to designate the conceptual opposite of populism: populism is based on the logic of equivalence, i.e. the bundling together of different demands and identities against a common outside, whereas institutionalism privileges the logic of difference over equivalence, i.e. the differential particularity of stand-alone demands and identities as opposed to attempts to unify them.
Seen this way, there are numerous directions one might go analytically with the concept of institutionalism. On the one hand, you have single-issue protest movements or campaigns, such as what David Howarth and Steven Griggs have repeatedly analyzed with Stop Stansted Expansion. On the other hand, institutionalism can also take the form of a divide-and-conquer strategy of selectively meeting social grievances halfway and keeping others isolated, as Laclau suggests with examples like One Nation conservatism. In other words, institutionalism “from above” is just as conceivable as institutionalism “from below.”
Authoritarian institutionalism, then, entails leveraging an institutionalist privileging of difference for an authoritarian project of closing off the space for political competition, up to and including the use of state repression. Authoritarianism is about claiming that there is only one legitimate claimant to power – this, of course, is a claim that anyone can make, including from a position of opposition – and, in its more advanced forms, shaping the apparatus of state around that claim, such that any real or would-be opposition is undermined. Authoritarianism in this sense could go hand in hand with populism – this would be a politics of permanent antagonism, against the alleged “deep state,” etc. – but also with institutionalism, i.e. precisely by rendering a politics of antagonism against those in power impossible. One can imagine a spectrum between two faces of authoritarianism: a differential or de-politicizing one on the one hand and an equivalential or hyper-politicizing one on the other.
This is where I see the value of authoritarian institutionalism as a concept: it captures a constitutive face of authoritarianism that often gets lost when scholars of various stripes rush to equate populism with authoritarianism. Think of how politics in authoritarian regimes works: those in power do not even bother to take part in public debates with members of the opposition or give them airtime on state television, etc. If Colin Crouch and others speak of “post-democracy” to describe the creeping hollowing out of liberal democracies, what you have in authoritarian regimes is a kind of anti-politics, where the political system as a whole and the repressive force of the state are deliberately refashioned to close off the space for opposition as much as possible.
Three years have passed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Where do you see the role of “authoritarian institutionalism” in the background to this war?
Russia presents a fascinating test case for authoritarian institutionalism for several reasons. The political system under Putin in the 2000s was widely (I would say misleadingly) described as “managed democracy”: you have a dominant party of power (United Russia) and three or four “systemic opposition” parties that play by the rules of the game and are allowed by the regime to operate. Not only that, you have parties like Just Russia that were basically created by the regime as a kind of pseudo-opposition channeling away votes from other parties (like the Communists, who were still the most oppositional of the lot). This raises questions about the boundaries of authoritarian institutionalism as a concept: on the one hand, you have a controlled operation of difference within an authoritarian system, but on the other hand, you have a more or less direct engineering of difference by the regime itself. Fast forward some 20 years later and things are looking even more farcical: you have almost the same four- or five-party setup with all the “systemic opposition” parties standing fully behind Putin’s brutal war of aggression on Ukraine. To what extent is it even meaningful to speak of “authoritarian institutionalism” in this context, if we take the operation of a logic of difference as the most basic criterion for institutionalism?
This is a question I address in the article. The key point is that even the heyday of “managed democracy” in the 2000s – when the system was clearly less repressive than today – does not fully fit the notion of authoritarian institutionalism and, in fact, points to its limits. You could say the balance shifted starting with Putin: in the Yeltsin years in the 1990s, the system was less authoritarian and more institutionalist, i.e. you had a fragmented party system with a much freer operation of difference, but you also had targeted repression and election fraud in the last instance to ensure the reproduction of presidential power. With Putin, you had more authoritarianism and less institutionalism from the beginning: in the party sphere, you can see this with the squeezing out of established actors and the creation of regime satellites like Just Russia, which amounts to a proactive reining in of differential variation in the party system.
Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 can be situated, I think, within the context of a longer process that had gone on for the previous decade. After the mass opposition protests of 2011/12, the regime turned toward heightened repression, going after “foreign agents” and “LGBT propaganda.” The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was part and parcel of this process by mobilizing aggressive nationalist sentiment behind the president. All this points to an equivalential and hyper-politicizing logic and not so much the differential and depoliticizing one of authoritarian institutionalism. But the problem for the Kremlin was that Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 unleashed various ultranationalist forces at home – “turbo-nationalists” as they are called nowadays – that agitated for a more aggressive expansionist policy and embraced the cause of the separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas. By launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the regime rallied most of the “turbo-nationalists” behind it and basically crushed what remained of the democratic extra-parliamentary opposition with its heightened wartime repression measures.
Where do you see the future of Russian politics from here?
The current situation is one that perfectly suits the Kremlin: you still have more or less the same four- or five-party setup from the days of so-called “managed democracy,” all of which stand firmly behind the war with the exception of Yabloko, which has been out of parliament for a long time and is extremely marginal. There was talk about merging the three or four “systemic opposition” parties in parliament into a “unity party” in support of the war effort, but there does not seem to be any reason for them to do so as long as they carry out their jobs in the eyes of the regime as they are currently constituted. Elections are more of a sham than ever and candidates opposed to the war (let alone opposed to the regime) are refused registration, as was the case in the March 2024 presidential election. The fate of Yabloko is perhaps illustrative for the state of Russian party politics: the party is still opposed to the war and allowed to operate as long as it does not openly agitate against it in public. The party’s longtime leader Grigory Yavlinsky is even granted occasional one-on-one audiences with Putin and makes a token statement afterwards that he and the president disagree on the war – and that is the end of it. To return to the theoretical vocabulary of the article, one could say that the formal operation of difference is still at work in a hollowed-out sense and within highly restrictive boundaries, which might seem meaningless but nonetheless shows how the Kremlin remains interested in maintaining this façade – at least for now.
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