The Vicious Circle of Post-Soviet Neopatrimonialism in Russia

Published online: 10 Aug 2015, journal issue (vol.32, N5) appeared in 2016Since the collapse of Communism, Russia and some other post-Soviet states have attempted to pursue socio-economic reforms while relying upon the political institutions of neopatrimonialism. This politico-economic order was established to serve the interests of ruling groups and establish the major features of states, political regimes, and market economies. It provided numerous negative incentives for governing the economy and the state due to the unconstrained rent seeking behavior of major actors. Policy reform programs discovered these institutions to be incompatible with the priorities of modernization, and efforts to resolve these contradictions through a number of partial and compromise solutions often worsened the situation vis-à-vis preservation of the status quo. The ruling groups lack incentives for institutional changes, which could undermine their political and economic dominance, and are caught in a vicious circle: reforms often result in minor returns or cause unintended and undesired consequences. What are the possible domestic and international incentives to reject the political institutions of neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet states and replace them with inclusive economic and political ones?Peer reviewe

The Principal Conflict in Contemporary Russian Economic Thought: Traditional Approaches Against Economics

The work deals with the ideological clashes in Russian economic thought after 1991. Based on Schumpeter's distinction between economic analysis and economic thought, the paper focuses on a principal conflict that divides a new generation of Western-minded scholars and traditional Russian political economists. This conflict, on the one hand, is described as an attempt of traditional political economists to keep their positions at the economic departments of the universities. The most vivid manifestation of the resistance to economics is the so-called Tsagolov School at Moscow State University. On the other hand, the conflict might be regarded as the reaction of Russian nationalism to the penetration of "alien" influences that are rather incompatible with the anti-individualist traditions of Russian social thought. The movement towards the creation of a "national political economy" based on holism and etatism is seen not only as an expression and a by-product of resistance to methodological individualism in economics, but also as implicitly state-induced ideological efforts in a period of transition to an autocratic regime in Russia