Coalitional Configurations: A Structural Analysis of Democratization in the Former Soviet Union

• In Event: 278 - Regular Session. Building and Transforming Civil Society

Abstract

This paper adopts Charles Tilly’s political process model on democratization. In this model, what matters for democratization are not institutions and substantive experiences of democracy per se, but qualities of interactions between authorities and subjects in the polity. We focus on one aspect of those interactions: coalitions. Coalitions are important for democratization because they express polity members’ protection from and access to governmental action. We refine aspects of coalitions using ideas from structural analysis that calls attention to integration and breadth as two key dimensions to coalitional structures. This coalitional framework reveals greater variation among polities than the democracy-dictatorship dichotomy and its combinations, such as ‘hybrid regimes.’ We use this framework to understand democratization in the former Soviet Union. One conclusion we draw from mapping changes in coalitions is the recent contraction of the polity in some countries from the FSU is a response to the growth of factionalized parties and personalized tyrannies.

Authors

• Jeffrey Hass, University of Richmond and St. Petersburg State University

• Andrew D. Buck, University of Southern Indiana