Samuel A. Greene

How Putin Wins Support

The Kremlin’s ability to maintain power and popularity despite an aging leader, an ailing economy, a rallying opposition, and many other domestic and international challenges is puzzling given current theories of authoritarianism. These theories focus on some combination of material interests, institutional engineering, and the charisma and skill of the dictator himself. A close examination of the Russian case, however, reveals that the real power of Putin’s dictatorship lies in the realm of ideas and emotions that chime with powerful currents in society, which in turn shape and limit the Kremlin’s strategies.

Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia

Personality research is a growing field in political behavior, but most research to date is confined to democracies. We expand the scope to Russia, an authoritarian regime, and find that the impact of personality is substantial but different from the existing literature. We find that agreeableness, a personality trait associated with a desire to maintain positive relations with others that is usually peripheral to politics, becomes the single most important and consistent trait affecting attitudes. This perspective helps us to understand why individuals who are socioeconomically and demographically similar can have quite different attitudes to the regime. Our analysis also helps us to understand the mechanisms through which personality works and how it shapes attitudes to such important elements as religion and state propaganda. Our findings suggest a new, and empirically testable, mechanism behind situations in which regimes rapidly dissolve, including revolutions.

Running to stand still: aggressive immobility and the limits of power in Russia

ABSTRACT The common conception of Russian politics as an elite game of rent-seeking and autocratic management masks a great deal of ‘mundane’ policymaking, and few areas of social and economic activity have escaped at least some degree of reform in recent years. This article takes a closer look at four such reform attempts – involving higher education, welfare, housing and regional policy – in an effort to discern broad patterns governing how and when the state succeeds or fails. The evidence suggests that both masses and mid-level elites actively defend informality – usually interpreted in the literature as an agent-led response to deinstitutionalization and the breakdown of structure – creating a strong brake on state power. More than a quarter century into the post-Soviet period, this pattern of “aggressive immobility” – the purposeful and concerted defense by citizens of a weakly institutionalized state – has in fact become an entrenched, structural element in Russian politics.

After Bolotnaia: Defining a ‘New Normal’ in Russian Public Politics

None of the following was supposed to happen. United Russia was not supposed to eke out a bare majority of seats in the Russian State Duma on 4 December 2011. Thousands of protestors were not supposed to throng Chistye Prudy and Lubianka in Moscow on 5 December 2011. Thousands more — tens of thousands more — were not supposed to converge on Bolotnaia Ploshchad’ on 10 December and on Prospekt Sakharova on 24 December. The protest was not supposed to survive the New Year holiday, and Vladimir Putin was not supposed to have to launch a major mobilizational effort to secure his own triumphal return to the Kremlin.