In the past, good governance did not emerge by default because of the good will of benevolent and prudent leaders and/or experts,61 but as a forced response by rulers to two interrelated challenges. First, fierce international rivalry led to numerous wars and bloody military conflicts, and those states that demonstrated ineffectiveness in both economic and military terms bore heavy losses and were even conquered by their more effective adversaries. This is why, according to Charles Tilly, rulers had to invest tremendous efforts in maintenance of control over their territories and in building effective state machinery, enabling them to exercise a monopoly on legitimate violence,62 collect necessary taxes,63 and use both the coercive and the infrastructural power of their states64 for survival in a highly competitive international environment. Over generations, these rulers faced the need to make governance more suitable for international competition not only in military but also in economic terms, thus paving the way to modern good governance.
Second, the ineffectiveness and corruption of governments prompted the rise of domestic political conflicts because of pressure from various political and economic actors and citizens at large. These conflicts often went beyond the rulers’ control and contributed to the spread of uncontrolled violence and civil wars, which developed into major threats to the very existence of the states and ruined their social orders. The classical analysis of economic history, which focuses on the emergence of the rule of law and transition toward good governance after the Glorious Revolution in late seventeenth-century England, serves as an illustration of the impact of these challenges.65 As Douglass North and his collaborators have demonstrated, the monarchy’s inefficient policy contributed to the fiscal crisis of the state and the subsequent chain of violent political crises (revolution—dictatorship—restoration). This lasted for some decades until competing actors reached the solution of building a new order via empowering the parliament and establishing a limited government that was constrained in terms of borrowing money. It was only later that good governance played an important role in the long-term and sustainable economic growth that helped Britain to enhance its positions in foreign policy arenas and protect itself from international challenges.
However, in the contemporary world the nature of international and domestic challenges to bad governance is qualitatively different to that in the past. Against the background of the rise of new authoritarian regimes after the end of the Cold War66 amid the global antidemocratic tide in the twenty-first century,67 the new nondemocratic leaders faced relatively short time horizons (especially true for personalist electoral autocracies)68 and were therefore tempted to govern their countries badly, to the point of notoriety. Still, not all modern autocracies have necessarily resulted in comprehensive bad governance, as some of them (most notably, China) were able to provide certain political and institutional constraints to rent-seeking and corruption, especially at subnational level.69 Nevertheless, examples of authoritarian good governance are relatively rare. Dani Rodrik summarized these tendencies in a brief statement: “for every President Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore there are many like President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo).”70
Meanwhile, the nature of constraints on bad governance has dramatically changed in the present day. Since large-scale wars are more or less matters of the past, corrupt and ineffective governments are no longer at risk of conquest by foreign nations or loss of power through defeat in war. International challenges to autocratic rulers are indirect and take effect in the medium term. Though the risk of losses in international economic competition because of bad governance may be a rather frustrating nuisance for corrupt and ineffective governments, such challenges are far from critical for the survival of political leaders. Sluggish economic growth, a decline in foreign investments, and capital flight bring negative consequences for the countries involved but they do not always put the ruling groups at risk of losing power and wealth, at least in the short term. In terms of control over domestic conflicts and violence, one might argue that bad governance is a functional mechanism that maintains a delicate balance among elites, thus preserving the political status quo71 if domestic pressure from political and economic actors and society at large is sporadic and can generally be kept under control by the ruling groups. Under conditions of bad governance, ruling groups, in turn, can co-opt some rent-seeking actors as their loyal followers or use selective coercion and repressions toward other actors. Thus, domestic pressures that may disequilibrate bad governance can also be diminished. And if and when both international and domestic pressures are weak enough, then bad governance, once established and entrenched, may reproduce itself over and over again despite (or even thanks to) regime and leadership changes.
Why Bad Governance
in
Russia?
Perhaps the best description of the emergence of bad governance in the existing literature was provided not by scholars, but by a novelist, William Golding.72 His Lord of the Flies is worth reading as a classic example of the making of bad governance, in this case on an uninhabited island by a community of teenagers.73 According to Golding’s plot, the trajectory of governance on this island went from a failed attempt to build an electoral democracy, through a short-lived informal oligarchy, to a seizure of power by the most brazen teenager who excluded his rivals from the community, reshuffled a coalition of his followers, and established a harsh repressive tyranny, which resulted in a catastrophe. In the novel, the encroachment of external actors (namely, navy officers) put an end to this trajectory, but in real life, the catastrophe of bad governance could have continued virtually forever. One should admit, however, that Golding’s characters were not doomed to bad governance because of unfavorable initial conditions: they were just ordinary teenagers left to their own devices. The main lesson of Lord of the Flies for political scientists is that bad governance is a natural logical outcome of the power maximization drive of successful brazen politicians who face insufficient constraints to their aspirations. Later, this argument was reformulated by leading scholars of authoritarianism who asserted that bad governance is typically the best politics for dictators:74 to a certain extent, the experience of post-Communist Russia and some of its neighbors in Eurasia fits these suppositions.
In this respect, the rise of bad governance in post-Communist Russia conformed to the logic of Lord of the Flies: indeed, it is practically the main outcome of the transformation of the Russian state after the collapse of the Soviet Union.75 This is what happens if and when ruling groups lack immediate domestic and international challenges and meet little resistance to making their dreams come true. They can rationally and purposively maintain a politico-economic order that is unavailable to ruling groups in other political conditions: post-Communist leaders have often faced almost no constraints on their aspirations of rent-seeking and building single power pyramids. In brief, the syndrome of bad governance in post-Soviet Eurasia arose as a side effect of several major transformations, including the decay and collapse of the Soviet state and post-Communist state capture76 first from the outside (by oligarchs) and then from the inside (by top bureaucrats). Major rent-seeking ruling actors aimed to privatize gains and socialize losses during the process of political and economic changes, and many of them encountered few, if any, constraints on achieving these goals in the turbulent post-Communist political environment.77 Thus, they consciously, consistently, and deliberately continue to build and maintain socially inefficient institutions, or “rules of the game.”78 But given the short-term horizon of their planning, which is often constrained by the performance legitimacy of the ruling groups,79 and because of the dubious prospects of successful hereditary succession,80 these actors most often act as “roving” rather than “stationary” bandits.81 They steal state resources to the point where the label “kleptocracy” is not merely opinion journalism but rather an adequate description of various leaders’ governance of Russia and post-Soviet states.82 It is no wonder that the winners of post-Communist regime changes and economic reforms, who were able to secure their positions vis-à-vis domestic competitors and international influences, have used various political and institutional devices to preserve bad governance, although their degree of success has varied across states, sectors, and policy areas. At the same time, the numerous losers among Russian citizens have rarely raised their voices about bad governance—bottom-up protests dealt with certain governance-related issues or (to a much lesser degree) with the autocratic tendencies of the regime as a whole,83 but not with the politico-economic order as such. Also, Russia, unlike its post-Communist counterparts in Eastern Europe,84 has encountered little influence from international actors in terms of pressure toward improving the quality of governance: Western leverages were weak,85 and more recently a drive for “sovereignty” of the Russian state at any cost has been serving as a shield aimed at the preservation of bad governance.