2. See Dmitry Travin, Prosushchestvuet li putinskaya sistema do 2042 goda? (Saint Petersburg: Norma, 2016).
3. See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Daniel Treisman, “Income, Democracy, and Leader Turnover,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 4 (2015): 927–942.
4. For these assessments, see Keith Grane, Shanthi Natharaj, Patrick B. Johnston, Gursel Rafig oglu Aliyev, Russia’s Mid-Term Economic Prospects (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2016); Marek Dabrowski, Antoine Mathieu Collin, “Russia’s Growth Problem,” Bruegel Policy Contribution, no. 4 (February 2019). Some critically minded observers have discussed the total lack of prospects for economic growth and development in Russia under its current political regime. See Zastoi-2: Posledstviya, riski i al’ternativy dlya rossiiskoi ekonomiki, ed. Kirill Rogov (Moscow: Liberal’naya missiya, 2021).
5. For this translation of Nekrasov, see “Russian Poetry in Translation,” allthelyrics.com, January 23, 2013, https://www.allthelyrics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=141341&page=2, accessed September 7, 2021.
6. See Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Sergei Guriev, Elias Papaioannou, “The Political Economy of Populism,” Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20201595&from=f, accessed February 16, 2022; Stephen E. Hanson, Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “Understanding the Global Neopatrimonial Wave,” Perspectives on Politics, “20, no. 1 (2022): 237-249.”
7. For the essence of these discussions of the 1970s, see Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
8. For these assessments, see Timothy Frye, “Russian Studies Are Thriving, Not Dying,” The National Interest, October 3, 2017, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russian-studies-thriving-not-dying-22547, accessed September 7, 2021. Judging from this perspective, the slogan “Know Your Enemy!” which served as a major driver of Soviet studies during the Cold War, has not lost its relevance. See David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
9. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 386–430.
10. See Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), especially chapter 31.
11. See Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” 493; Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 27–28.
12. For an analysis of interconnections between formal and informal institutions, see Gretchen Helmke, Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004): 725–740. For a more comprehensive overview, see International Handbook on Informal Governance, eds. Thomas Christiansen, Christine Newhold (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012).
13. See Hanson, Kopstein, “Understanding the Global Neopatrimonial Wave.”
14. For divergent perspectives of analysis, see Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Guriev, Papaioannou, “The Political Economy of Populism.”
15. See Javier Coralles, “Authoritarian Legalism in Venezuela,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 2 (2015): 37–51; Kirk A. Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism: Chavismo in Venezuela,” Democratization 23, no. 2 (2016): 242–262.
16. See “Exit from Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2008): special issue; “Critical Crossroads: Erdogan and the Transformation of Turkey,” Mediterranean Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2018): special issue.
17. See Roger E. Hamilton, “Russia’s Attempts to Undermine Democracy in the West: Effects and Causes,” Orbis 63, no. 3 (2019): 334–348; Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), especially chapter 6.
18. See, for example, Levitsky, Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; David Cay Johnson, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); American Political Development and the Trump Presidency, eds. Zachary Callen, Philip Rocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
19. On the practices of kompromat, see Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially chapter 3.
20. On the impact of the global economic crisis on Hungary, see, for example, Laszlo Andor, “Hungary in the Financial Crisis: A (Basket) Case Study,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 17, no. 3 (2009): 285–296. For broader overviews of economic and political changes in post-Communist Hungary, see Umut Korkut, Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Adam Fabry, The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).