We have entered a closed circle. In order to be elected, you have to have power, and in order to have power, you have to be elected.—A. Kynev
According to András Sájo, professor of law at the Central European University in Budapest and academician of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, “the electoral system is at all times a playing field jealously guarded by politicians, in whose rules outsiders are not allowed to interfere.”1 Why? Because the electoral system and its consolidation in the electoral legislation determine the procedure for the formation of a certain empowered majority, which gets the opportunity to establish binding rules for everyone, including rules on how this majority should come about, with the condition that the majority created by this method again will determine the manner in which the next majority will come about.
That is, the goal of free and fair elections is the formation of an authorized body that, on behalf of the population, adopts generally binding rules of conduct and is a counterbalance (or control) to the executive power. All these three functions—representation, independent rule-making and control — taken together are the defining quality of the parliament. If a body, even if called a parliament, does not possess this quality, then, in essence, it is not one. All democratic transformations in the world began with elections and parliaments. Gradually, the electoral systems and parliamentary powers changed, but in any case, democratic movement has always aimed at expanding the participation of the population in the adoption of state-power decisions and at improving the ways to achieve consensus between society and government through equal competition of elites in elections. This is where the red line runs that separates democracies from non-democratic regimes.2
This means that it is the electoral system and its legal design—electoral legislation—that is the magic key that, depending on the goals and objectives of the authorities, opens or closes the doors of democracy. It is on electoral legislation and on elections as a result of its implementation that the qualitative condition, limits and possibilities of representative bodies depend—institutions that not only set the rules of the game, but which also limit the executive power as being the most potentially authoritarian. And it is precisely this electoral legislation that ultimately determines the effectiveness of the system of separation of powers, the configuration, essence, content and procedure for the interaction of all state institutions.
But exactly for the same reason, the electoral legislation is the main risk group when changing power priorities. If these priorities deviate from the democratic trajectory, the electoral legislation will be the first to fall under attack, since the legitimization of such deviations will certainly require an obedient rule-maker who is ready not to discuss and not to argue, but simply to execute. And by no means to act as a control, but, on the contrary, to be a faithful ally of the executive branch, unconditionally supporting and approving all its initiatives. Such obedience can be achieved only through specific procedures for the formation of elected bodies, which ensure a special personal selection of their members for passive loyalty—a quality that largely determines the essence and content of the activities of future political institutions and creates the basic conditions for the legitimation of any political regime.
Authoritarian leaders in countries with democratic constitutions have to adapt to an extremely uncomfortable legal environment for them and to the requirements of Common Legal Thinking (the presence of generally accepted international democratic standards). Under these conditions, they are forced to make great efforts to create and maintain a “facade” that resembles democratic institutions and is designed to mask the essence of dictatorships. This can only be done by creating and maintaining a system of electoral authoritarianism.
Herein lays the difference. An electoral democracy is a regime where politicians and parties can lose power as a result of electoral defeat, because elections are their basic source of authority. But if in liberal democracies elections work as a tool for changing power, reflecting changing public interests, then managed elections in authoritarian conditions serve to preserve the status quo, helping rulers stay in power3 through artificially formed parliaments that obediently change the rules of the game to suit the needs of autocrats. Keeping the incumbents in power is a priority goal and is achieved at any cost.
Starting with the “third wave” of democratization, and especially in the post-Soviet space, regimes that are authoritarian in nature and successfully implement the initially democratic political institutions, including elections, are becoming more widespread. However, the presence of such institutions in autocracies should not mislead anyone. The main mechanisms for the reproduction of power in such regimes are precisely authoritarian.
The state carries out such a serious, widespread and manipulative interference in the electoral process that there is no room to speak about any democratic nature of elections.4 The main difference between electoral democracy and electoral authoritarianism is determined by the quality of electoral competition. It is on this field that one regime is replaced by another. Through an obedient rule-maker, autocracies manipulate the rules of competition (electoral legislation), which are constantly transformed in favour of the incumbent, depending on the electoral mood of the society. In addition to imitation of democracy, autocratic regimes need elections, among other things, because they perform a number of other important tasks. First of all is the legitimization of the regime—the creation of the official illusion of having authority in the eyes of those who are subject to it, and the appearance of agreement to the power of those who claim power.5
And although authoritarian elections are not tasked at all with fulfilling the most important function of elections in democratic systems—the change of power—nevertheless, such a change following the results of elections is possible even under conditions of authoritarianism. This is due to the fact that the measure of the legitimizing function of authoritarian elections depends on the quality of democratic imitation. That is, for authoritarian elections to contribute to the legitimization of incumbents, they must win electoral victories without obvious abuses. Crooked elections are a double-edged weapon. A high level of fraud that cannot be hidden could lead to an acute crisis in the legitimacy of electoral authoritarian regimes, as evidenced by the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election in Belarus.6 But if this happens, it rather indicates a “failure” of the regime, that it has reduced or lost its authoritarian potential for some time. Protests are always an indicator of the weakening or destabilization of the regime. Stunning or upset elections in conditions of authoritarianism, as a rule, arenot a cause, but a consequence of the collapse of authoritarian regimes. But given minimal stability of autocracies, holding regular elections, on average, increases their survival rate.7
This is how a vicious circle of authoritarian elections arises, when “in order to be elected, one must have power, and in order to have power, one must be elected.”8 Setting irremovability from office as his goal, the autocrat in any case falls into the trap of the need to permanently tighten the electoral screws and increase the falsification potential, which inevitably leads to an aggravation of the confrontation between the authorities and society, to political crises and to the weakening of the regime. There are many cases when violations during elections and their controversial results became the reason for mass protests and the subsequent transformation of the regime, sometimes through so-called velvet revolutions, and sometimes through the democratization of the political system “from above,” under pressure from protesters. In addition, the elections themselves also contain the potential to counteract authoritarianism. The presence of a legal platform for political struggle, albeit a severely limited one, can contribute to the formation of opposition forces and play the role of an instrument of democratization.9
Preservation of power at any cost for a particular period of time is always a tactical task. But the consequences of a tactical victory are far from being strategically unambiguous and could lead to a potentially dangerous result for the regime. Therefore, the expression “they know what they are doing, but they know not what they do” very accurately characterizes what is happening in Russia today. Paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy, political scientists joke that “all democracies are alike, but each autocracy is unhappy in its own way.”10 Electoral authoritarianism is a stagnant, corrupt political system that has brought nothing but poverty to the peoples long caught in this trap. Comparative political studies show that the democratization prospects for such regimes are rather weak. On the one hand, they can acquire long-term stability, which means that democratization is delayed. On the other hand, if they do fail, military dictatorships often take their place. The brute-force regimes themselves usually end either in coups aimed at returning to civilian rule, or in revolutions. After that, with a fairly high degree of probability comes democracy.
Politicians and lawyers. Two perspectives on the same problem
Huge numbers of studies have been written about Russian elections and the transformation of Russian electoral legislation. More by lawyers, a little less, but still a lot, by political scientists. Both explore the same phenomenon from different angles and use different terminology.
In general, political scientists and lawyers have many of the same objects of research: political regimes, forms of government, governmental structure, elections, political parties, the state of political competition, the system of separation of powers, the division of powers between state bodies, the relationship between the state and society, etc. Only approaches and methods differ. For example, the course “Parliamentarism and the Fundamentals of Lawmaking” as an independent academic discipline is taught, each in her own university, by political scientist Ekaterina Shulman and lawyer Elena Lukyanova, one in the Faculty of Political Science, and the other in the Faculty of Law. For the first, rule-making is a political process, for the second, method of organization and activity and of legal regulation, and the analysis of practice. What if both approaches are combined? It seems that in this case the result of both analyses will be more reliable. Perhaps when lawyers introduce the word “incumbent” into scholarly usage, and political scientists learn to use the phrases “electoral systems” and “electoral legislation” instead of the term “electoral institution,” we will finally hear and recognize each other, and at the same time mutually sharpen our scholarly optics. But something tells us that it’s not about our mutual ignorance of each other. What then? It seems that the reason is extremely bureaucratically banal.
The fact is that until the beginning of the 1990s, there was no systematized and separately recognized political science in Russia, although back in 1804 a department or faculty of moral and political sciences was created at Moscow University. However, despite the presence of the works of a number of pre-revolutionary scholars (B. N. Chicherin, V. S. Solovyov, P. I. Novgorodtsev, and I. A. Ilyin), to fully explore such issues as political power and its social foundations in the conditions of autocracy, theory of elites, typologies of political and party systems and civil society, was impossible. Just as under the conditions of Soviet ideological uniformity, the emergence of a systematic political science could not, by definition, take place, although there were attempts to do so. Suffice it to recall the appearance in the 1960s–1980s of a group of Soviet social scientists (G. Arbatov, O. Bogomolov, F. Burlatsky, B. Grushin, Iu. Levada, G. Osipov, A. Rumyantsev, G. Shakhnazarov, F. Petrenko, M. Titarenko, and others).
Here is what modern researchers write about Soviet social science:
In the Soviet state, the concept of “social sciences” was firmly established in the official vocabulary immediately after the 1917 revolution. At the same time, it was about creating a fundamentally new model of social science, in contrast to the pre-revolutionary system. Its foundations were laid by V. I. Lenin. In the draft Regulations on the People’s Commissariat of Education (early 1921), he specifically pointed out that “the content of education should be determined only by the communists.” So in the USSR, the functions of social science to protect the Soviet political and ideological system became the main ones, and the function of social criticism atrophied. A feature of the social sciences in the Soviet Union was the fundamental dependence on Soviet ideology, the closing off of dialogue with scholarly opponents, and the impossibility of free scientific development outside the sanctioned communist ideas. The prospects for the development of social science were determined by the degree of their impact on the consciousness of people, and not by the scientific search for objective truth.11
Therefore, what is now called political science was partly handed over to lawyers. It was their educational and scientific classifiers that included the history of political and legal doctrines, political and electoral systems, forms of government, parliamentarism and federalism. Of course lawyers study phenomena from their own normative-institutional point of view and using methods other than those of political science. They more often define the state without analyzing the prerequisites, goals and objectives of the government, that is, without explicit politics, a method which was what the Soviet government needed. But at least the subjects themselves and the terminology remained in the programs of higher education.
Only in March 1987, under pressure from the already mentioned group of Soviet scholars, a joint Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR was adopted, instructing the relevant governing bodies and other organizations to revise the nomenclature of scientific specialties, as a result of which, in the fall of 1988, specialties in political and sociological sciences appeared in this nomenclature.12 In the preface to his book, Vladimir Gelman, a mechanical engineer by training, writes: “Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to receive a formal education in the field of political science. Despite this (or because of it?), I later became a professor of political science at two universities in two different countries.”13Other reputable Russian political scientists likewise did not have such an opportunity, for example philologist Kirill Rogov, historians Grigory Golosov, Tatyana Vorozheykina, and Gleb Pavlovsky, journalist-historian Sergei Medvedev, and geographer Dmitry Oreshkin.
Naturally, after 70 years of the official non-existence of Russian political science, it had to re-learn the basics and actively “catch up” with world studies that had gone far in this direction. Having received recognition, it actively and with great enthusiasm took up this challenge, leaving without attention or “for later” the work of its lawyer colleagues, who for many years partly filled the void in this area. This is how the separation of disciplines took place, supported by a scientific-bureaucratic procedure, when scientific councils blame the authors of studies for a mixture of approaches and are jealous and protective of any intrusion into their priority and monopoly on truth. Lawyers-constitutionalists are particularly zealous in this, proceeding from a legalist approach to law and being afraid of the penetration of a slightly different (primarily political) view of problems that seem to them exclusively legal. For example, the relationship between elections and the quality of the work of parliaments is denied. Thus, an artificial loss of fields of scholarly vision occurs, which is extremely detrimental to qualitative scholarly analysis. Although in the modern world, different disciplines, on the contrary, are connected, intersected and mutually enriched at an accelerated pace. Political economy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemical physics and many others have long become familiar and understandable areas of combined knowledge. Therefore, we will try to overcome the artificial and, in our opinion, extremely harmful barrier between political science and public law science, based on the fact that the legal regulation of power relations cannot be explained and properly understood without an analysis of political relations and processes.