Philip G. Roeder

Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization

Central among recent changes in the Soviet Union is an expanding and increasingly public politics of federalism. The Soviet developmental strategy assigned federalism and the cadres of national-territorial administration a central role in its response to the “nationalities question.” This strategy offers a key to three questions about the rise of assertive ethnofederalism over the past three decades: Why have federal institutions that provided interethnic peace during the transition to industrialization become vehicles of protest in recent years? Why have relatively advantaged ethnic groups been most assertive, whereas groups near the lower end of most comparative measures of socioeconomic and political success have been relatively quiescent? Why have major public demands—and the most important issues of contention between center and periphery—focused to such a large degree upon the details of the Soviet developmental strategy and upon federalism in particular

Partition as a Solution to Wars of Nationalism: The Importance of Institutions

Civil war settlements create institutional arrangements that in turn shape postsettlement politics among the parties to the previous conflict. Following civil wars that involve competing nation-state projects, partition is more likely than alternative institutional arrangements—specifically, unitarism, de facto separation, and autonomy arrangements—to preserve the peace and facilitate democratization. A theory of domestic political institutions as a constraint on reescalation of conflict explains this unexpected relationship through four intermediate effects—specifically, the likelihood that each institutional arrangement will reinforce incompatible national identities, focus the pursuit of greed and grievance on a single zero-sum conflict over the allocation of decision rights, empower the parties to the previous conflict with multiple escalatory options, and foster incompatible expectations of victory. The theorys predictions stand up under statistical tests that use four alternative datasets.

Clash of Civilizations and Escalation of Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflicts

The clash-of-civilizations thesis asserts that differences between civilizations increase the likelihood of escalation of conflicts and that since the end of the cold war, fault lines between civilizations are becoming the sites of the most intense conflicts. The author tests the tenability of this claim concerning domestic ethnopolitical conflicts. Statistical tests employ logit analysis to analyze 1,036 ethnopolitical dyads (linking 130 governments and 631 ethnic groups) from 1980 to 1999. The results strongly support the claim of the clash-of-civilizations thesis that in the first post-cold war decade (1990 to 1999), contacts between civilizations within states were more likely than were contacts that do not cross linguistic or religious lines to escalate to more intense conflicts. Yet, the apparent increase in conflict between civilizations in the 1990s was part of an escalation in all types of cross-cultural conflict that does not in itself portend continued escalation in the clash of civilizations.

Ethnofederalism and the Mismanagement of Conflicting Nationalisms

Recent discussions of federal solutions to ethnic conflict have focused on ethnofederal arrangements; in these the constituent units are homelands for ethnic minorities. Like autonomy arrangements in non-federal states, these institutional arrangements structure subsequent politics in ways that increase the likelihood of escalating conflict that results in nation-state crises. Tinkering with the institutional details of these arrangements is unlikely to exorcise these problems.

Modernization and Participation in the Leninist Developmental Strategy

The Soviet Union achieved its stability in the early stages of development not by institutionalizing participation but by forcing departicipation and substituting a functionally distinct form of political activity—involvement in co-production. These policies constitute essential complements in the Leninist developmental strategy. The ability of enlisted involvement to block the growth of participatory pressures tends to decline in later stages of development, however. The result is spontaneous withdrawal from the institutions of coproduction and the rise of participatory pressures. This pattern is documented with evidence from Soviet electoral and membership statistics, Soviet reports of opinion surveys, Western interviews of Soviet emigres, and cross-national estimates of political dissidence. The Leninist crisis of participation requires a policy response to close the participation-institution gap once again. The alternative policy responses of Soviet general secretaries are characterized as totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal, and socialist.

The Ties that Bind: Aid, Trade, and Political Compliance in Soviet-Third World Relations

The theory of Soviet-centered dependence argues that Soviet economic and military aid to Third World states increases the recipients trade dependence on the Soviet Union. This dependence, in turn, induces political compliance with the Soviet Union. The present study tests the key hypotheses of this theory. It finds that trade dependence on the Soviet Union provides a significant source of political compliance with the Soviet Union. It finds that the trade dependence effect of Soviet military assistance declined from the 1960s to the 1970s, but that military aid increased in importance as a direct instrument of influence. It also finds that the trade dependence effect of Soviet economic assistance has increased even as economic aid has failed to prove to be an important instrument of direct influence.

Do New Soviet Leaders Really Make a Difference? Rethinking the “Succession Connection”

According to an increasingly more widely held view, Leninist regimes tend to pump up mass-oriented policies during succession crises. Yet, this empirically based theory contains significant conceptual and methodological flaws, suggesting the need to reexamine the evidence and rethink the thesis. Using the Soviet evidence, a retest of its hypotheses fails to support this thesis. An alternative, consolidation connection is proposed here which considers the impact of political processes upon a General Secretarys capacity to innovate as well as his incentive structure. Tests of these hypotheses show a significantly higher rate of confirmation than the retest of the original thesis.

Risk and Progressive Candidacies: An Extension of Rohde's Model

Rohde limits his analysis to U.S. Representatives-actors who must give up their presently held offices to run for higher office. But what of the incumbent when he need not risk his current position in order to run for higher office? We offer here an extension of Rohdes model to distinguish the incumbent when he can seek promotion without first giving up his present office (low-risk promotion opportunity) from the

The Effects of Leadership Succession in the Soviet Union

What happens when there is a change in leadership in the Soviet Union? Does the period of leadership succession present unusual opportunities for domestic policy concerns to be vented? Or, are major issues on the Soviet domestic policy agenda addressed mainly after a succession of leadership is completed? Answers to such questions have a bearing on how the Soviet elite is replenished, and more generally help to improve understanding of Soviet politics. Two specialists on Soviet and East European politics, Valerie Bunce and Philip Roeder, have been drawn to different conclusions about these issues.

Soviet Policies and Kremlin Politics

Soviet foreign policy reflects the characteristics of the political process that produces it. Since 1953, the Soviet policymaking process has assumed five distinct forms—here called ‘regimes’. Each regime—Pluralistic, Directive, Primatial, Oligarchic, and Cartelistic—corresponds to a specific pattern of intra-elite competition and division of decisionmaking authority. Each regime, in turn, yields a unique ‘policy syndrome’—a unique combination of policy attributes. Here, four attributes are considered: consistency, responsiveness, coherence, and risk-taking. The relationships between regimes and policy syndromes are tested empirically, using COPDAB measures of Soviet-American interaction between 1953 and 1977.