In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Contested Liberalization Russia’s Politics of Polarization and Informalization In December 1993, Russian citizens elected a new legislature and narrowly approved a new constitution. The 1993 Russian constitution privileged the executive, giving him strong appointment, decree, and veto powers. But the new legislature, especially its lower house, the Duma, did provide some representation for societal interests, and it exercised stronger political constraint on the president than had its predecessor. A broad spectrum of political parties, including moderate-reformist and hard-left, produced programs, ran candidates, and sought electoral support . These first competitive legislative elections produced a backlash against the broader market transition and transformed the politics of welfare. The political constellation that had permitted non-negotiated liberalization in the early 1990s gave way to one in which welfare state change was contested, first (in the 1993 Duma) by a moderate coalition that sought to negotiate change and then (in the 1995 Duma) by a radical coalition that largely obstructed it. During this period, Russia’s GDP continued to decline overall, although less sharply than in the early 1990s, falling by about 4 percent in each of 1995 and 1996, growing slightly in 1997, and then declining an additional 5 percent as a result of the 1998 financial crisis. Welfare effort remained fairly stable while real expenditures continued to fall through the decade. In this chapter, I look at societal and political effects on welfare politics during this period of incipient democratization. I first ask whether 100 Postcommunist Welfare States the welfare state constituencies that are familiar from the Western literature , particularly trade unions, public-sector workers, and women’s organizations, mobilized to defend established benefits and programs and whether Russia’s quasi-democratic political process afforded them influence. Did unionists, teachers, and women in Russia organize, find political allies, and affect policy change? I look at linkages between prowelfare societal constituencies and political parties and map the welfare programs and legislative agendas of parties that played a significant role in the Duma. The evidence shows that public-sector unions, women, and others did organize politically to defend their interests, but in the end their influence was constricted by the weakness and fragmentation of Russia’s unions, the instability of political parties, and the nonaccountability of the government. Moderate pro-welfare societal interests played a temporary and diminishing political role in negotiating welfare state change. Opposition to reform was nevertheless mobilized through Russia’s new political institutions. Diffuse groups of older and poorer citizens and nationalist organizations supported hard-left, anti-market communist successor parties that formed a dominant legislative coalition in the mid-1990s. Despite the constitutional limits on its power, the legislature became a key veto actor, blocking the executive’s efforts to dismantle statist structures of social provision and to construct new private markets for public goods. Executive and legislature polarized over welfare reform, producing policy deadlock. Resistance to welfare reform also emerged in the government. Disorganization within the state bureaucracy during the early 1990s had permitted decentralizing changes that greatly weakened the social ministries. But support for these reforms was shallow, largely confined to the Finance and Economics Ministries and the Gaidar government’s liberal social ministers, who had been replaced by late 1992. From that point, the social ministries began to resist the loss of authority and resources resulting from the early reforms.1 Until 1997 President Yeltsin did not make serious efforts to rebuild a social-sector reform team, and the ongoing economic decline limited the possibilities for the government to compensate powerful opponents. State-based 1 On the advantages and disadvantages of reforms carried out with minimal negotiation or consensus building, see “Introduction,” in Reforming the State: Fiscal And Welfare Reform in Post-Socialist Countries, edited by Janos Kornai, Stephan Haggard, and Robert R. Kaufman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–22. Contested Liberalization 101 stakeholders waged a rearguard campaign against the executive’s policies of destatization. The governmental elite was deeply divided over welfare reform. In sum, although the 1993 constitution appeared to privilege executive power, legislative and bureaucratic resistance shifted the balance against welfare state restructuring. The executive continued to pursue a liberalizing agenda in a piecemeal fashion and then more systematically from 1997 when the World Bank intervened to try to revive the restructuring process. I show, however, that the Bank’s interventions were largely thwarted by domestic political resistance. Overall, although Yeltsin’s government succeeded in cutting social expenditures, it failed to implement its liberalizing agenda in any...

Share