Popular Choice and Managed Democracy. The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000

Publication date
Monday, 06.10.2003

Authors
Timothy Colton Michael McFaul

Series
Brookings Institution Press 2003

Annotation

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: The Transition within the Transition
2 Setting the Scene
3 The Party of Power
4 The Party of Hubris
5 The Communists
6 The Liberals
7 Putin
8 Results, Consequences, and Implications
APPENDIXES
A The Survey Work
B A Statistical Model of the Vote
C The Mass Media and the Elections
D Tracing the Flow of the Vote
Notes

DESCRIPTION

Twice in the winter of 1999-2000, citizens of the Russian Federation flocked to their neighborhood voting stations and scratched their ballots in an atmosphere of uncertainty, rancor, and fear. This book is a tale of these two elections—one for the 450-seat Duma, the other for President.

Despite financial crisis, a national security emergency in Chechnya, and cabinet instability, Russian voters unexpectedly supported the status quo. The elected lawmakers prepared to cooperate with the executive branch, a gift that had eluded President Boris Yeltsin since he imposed a post-Soviet constitution by referendum in 1993. When Yeltsin retired six months in advance of schedule, the presidential mantle went to Vladimir Putin—a career KGB officer who fused new and old ways of doing politics. Putin was easily elected President in his own right.

This book demonstrates key trends in an extinct superpower, a troubled country in whose stability, modernization, and openness to the international community the West still has a huge stake.

Timothy J. Colton is professor of government and Russian studies in the Department of Government and director of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. His previous books include Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Harvard, 1995), named best book in government and political science 1995 by the Association of American Publishers.

Michael McFaul is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also an associate professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin(Carnegie, 2001).

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Notes

c. 304pp.
Cloth Text, 0-8157-1534-x

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