Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 29 – Russia’s “hybrid”
political system, one based on a combination of democratic and authoritarian
elements that have led to a super-presidentialist arrangement that leaves little
or no political room for any political action by either the population or the
elites, has infantilized citizens and mercantilized elites, Pavel Baranov says.
Other than voting for the president,
something that happens only once every six years, the population is reduced to
being observers of the system rather than participants, the legal specialist at
the Southern Russia Institute of Admdinistration says, and is infantilized by a
propaganda system that stresses foreign challenges rather than domestic issues.
And kept from playing a political
role by the absence of checks and balances that elites in other countries use
to advance their own interests, Baranov continues, Russian elites are left with
only one possible course of action: the pursuit of mercantilist economicadvantage
(ng.ru/stsenarii/2018-05-29/9_7234_constitution.html).
As a result, he says in a detailed
analyst of the constitutional and historical elements that have allowed this system
to develop, neither the population nor the elites are in fact directly engaged
in politics aat least in the normal sense and thus cannot be analyzed in the
way that the actions of masses and elites are in other systems.
That in turn means that neither the
one nor the other currently has the opportunities to develop into politically
effective players but instead is prepared to accept its situation, as observers
of the defense of the country in the case of the mass population and as economic
actors concerned only with their own enrichment.
Baranov does not say but his analysis implies that the longer the Putinist super-presidentialist system survives, the more difficult it will be for either the population or the elites to recover and play their normal roles in the development of a more participatory political system.
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