Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies

5 Distributive Politics and Formal Institutions in New Democracies: The Effect of Electoral Rules on Budget Voting in the Russian State Duma, 1994 – 2003

118 Chapter 5 Distributive Politics and Formal Institutions in New Democracies The Effect of Electoral Rules on Budget Voting in the Russian State Duma, 1994–2003 Jana Kunicová Distributive Politics in Postcommunist Countries Transition from authoritarianism to democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has brought about massive changes in distributive politics of the region. Most of the literature on the subject emphasizes the “dual” nature of this transition: the shift from a single-party authoritarian system to multiparty competitive democracy was accompanied by the move from centrally planned economy with state-owned means of production to market economy with private ownership. In this context, political scientists and economists alike have concentrated their attention on the massive redistribution of resources associated with privatization (Hellman 1998; Kaufmann and Siegelbaum 1999), price liberalization (Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann 2000), and dismantling of the social safety net (Cook 2002). That the aftermath of the economic reforms has brought dramatic increases in inequality and the concentration of wealth is well documented (Hellman 1998; Milanovic 1999). In addition, the duality of economic and political transition implied that these processes took place during the period of political flux. New democratic institutions—electoral rules, executive-legislative relations, federal structures—were being designed, adopted, and implemented. Both politicians and voters were learning to operate within these institutions. Winners and losers from the economic Distributive Politics and Formal Institutions in New Democracies 119 reform were attempting to learn and use the channels of representation to their advantage (Kaminski 1999; Moser 2001; Luong 2002; Filippov, Ordeshook , and Shvetsova 2004). Importantly, once the process of economic transformation is completed, political institutions continue to channel distributive politics. In the aftermath of the dual transition, the “tectonic shifts” of privatization, price liberalization, and other profound redistributive reforms are replaced by mundane distributive pressures of democratic politics. Redistribution is now channeled through the allocation of the national budget. It may take place through redistribution from the young to the old (in the form of new national pension systems), from employed to unemployed (as stateprovided unemployment insurance), or from healthy to ill (as nationally provided health care), or it can be regionally based, from the rich regions to the poor ones, from warm to cold ones, and so on. In established democracies , the distributive outcomes are expected to be influenced by the types of political institutions that govern democratic process. The main question that this chapter addresses is whether formal institutions, once established, have the same expected effects in new democracies. Do institutions begin affecting the behavior of political actors as soon as they are adopted, or is there a period of institutional “learning”? Is the direction of these effects the same as in developed democracies? Anecdotal evidence from the Russian State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, suggests that the members of parliament in Russia respond to distributive pressures channeled through electoral institutions . Students of the American Congress would recognize much of the pork-barrel politics that occurs there. Consider this impassioned plea for appropriating an additional twenty-six billion rubles (about $1 billion) in agricultural subsidies by the leader of the agrarian faction in the Russian State Duma in the course of debate on the 2001 budget: Dear friends, I will not try to wring a tear out of you, but I appeal to everyone, especially those who in their biography proudly write that they were born in the countryside, to vote for this amendment. You have a historically unique opportunity with your vote to stretch a hand out and give it to your ailing mother. Your mother today is called the countryside. We all say that we have only one natural mother. Our second mother is the countryside. (Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenogramma zasedanii [The State Duma: Stenogram of Sessions], Biulleten’ No. 53 (501), October 20, 2000, pp. 46–47) 120 Jana Kunicová Despite his urging, and despite the near-unanimous support of the communist and agrarian factions, his amendment was defeated. In the course of the same debate, a deputy from Saratov oblast proposed an amendment to the budget law increasing state spending on water-control projects. Arguing that dams and reservoirs all over the country were in a critical state of disrepair and urgently needed emergency repairs, he added, “This especially concerns the Volga falls.” Students of legislative politics would hardly be surprised to learn that he was elected from a single-member district through which runs...