Bryon Moraski’s tightly argued, careful analysis of the consequences of introducing closed-list proportional representation in two countries currently locked in a massive, yet undeclared, land war leverages a narrowly construed question about electoral rules to shed light on big questions in politics. Scholars have long recognized that authoritarian leaders can use elections as an instrument of legitimation. But as Moraski suggests, how authoritarians have used the design of electoral systems to serve their own aims has received relatively less attention. Among competitive electoral systems, proportional representation (PR) is widely regarded as a comparatively equitable way to pool votes and aggregate preferences. Moraski shows that even as implementation of a closed-list PR system may incite similar behavioral responses among politicians across diverging regimes, the consequences of that behavior can contribute to authoritarian consolidation. By analyzing party-list formation across different electoral cycles, Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine shows how antidemocratic politicians can use rules intended to widen democratic representation for their own aims and how unforeseen consequences of rule changes for political coalitions can destabilize politics in competitive electoral contexts.
The weaponization of democratic institutions to consolidate authoritarian rule is by now a familiar story. Even as politicians with authoritarian ambitions often rely on informal institutions to maintain power, they also regularly use rule changes within formal institutions to consolidate it. Kim Lane Scheppele has shown how Hungary’s Victor Orbán has presided over minor rule changes in a mixed system, reassigning “surplus” votes to party lists to win even highly contested elections, while Maria Popova has analyzed Putin’s rule by law. Moraski’s study contributes to this literature with a novel analysis of correlates and consequences of party-list placement; its findings resonate with the ways Kremlin-adjacent politicians practice in a variety of other national contexts. Moraski highlights party tactics in Russia that echo or anticipate those of self-styled populists elsewhere who expanded their constituencies by involving people theretofore uninvolved in party politics: United Russia, rather than trying to bring people formerly affiliated with other parties into the party fold, recruited representatives by co-opting independent deputies, He also shows that, across the state border in Ukraine during the same period, the Our Ukraine party used party-list formation as a tool to co-opt rather than convert local politicians.
Because Moraski analyzes the implementation of electoral rule change in two countries that, during the period under analysis, seemed to most scholars to be situated near different ends of the democracy–authoritarianism spectrum, the implications of his findings for the two are different. If the Russian case reminds us that politicians with ambitions to single-party rule can adapt to use even more distributive vote-pooling rules to their advantage, examination of the Ukrainian case ultimately shows that frequent change in the rules of the game can introduce instability into electoral politics.
Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine was written before Russia’s full-scale war of conquest and undisguised genocidal intent and before most Ukrainians have had to fight for their lives and the sovereignty of their state. As Moraski acknowledges, a “most similar cases” research design comparing Russia and Ukraine may suggest uncomfortable political resonance for some: the Kremlin has waged violence in the names of brotherhood and similarity, even as Ukrainians roundly reject this claim as imperial pretension. Moraski asserts that with the choice of these two cases, the book’s analysis “helps control for historical and cultural legacies” (p. 14). On the one hand, such a position can be problematic insofar as it elides divergent contemporary practices of political engagement, distinct traditions of state identity, and Russians’ and Ukrainians’ different experiences with the Soviet state, which included genocide for millions of Ukrainians (rural famine also occurred in Soviet Russia, but unaccompanied by concurrent campaigns of cultural extermination). On the other hand, the objects of such elision are not central to the book’s argument, which focuses on the consequences of the rule changes across diverging regimes and amid weak party institutionalization. Still, both the current war and its likely future reverberations offer an opportunity to reexamine how we think about assumptions underlying case selection, embedded as they often are in dominant geopolitically inflected narratives that may or may not reflect the self-perceptions of people who live in given polities.
A comparison of politics in Russia and in Ukraine bumps up against another thorny problem: long-standing Kremlin efforts to influence Ukrainian domestic electoral politics and the deep mutual imbrication of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchic capital in the conduct of Ukrainian politics during the period under investigation. Paul D’Anieri addressed these processes in Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2019). Although Moraski’s analysis in this book does not include this issue, it is one that complicates modeling of correlates of party-list inclusion in Ukraine. During a period of intensive cross-border engagement, how did networks of relationships, including political and economic ties with Russia, affect Ukrainian politicians’ inclusion on party lists, and how would one quantify the influence of such relationships on decisions to include them?
Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine offers conclusions based on an analysis of painstakingly compiled data about district-level politicians and the correlates of party-list composition. This approach is well aligned with the book’s central research question. Yet, what else might we learn by thinking about these findings in dialogue with other methods and forms of data? We know that in authoritarian systems and within political parties led by leaders harboring authoritarian ambitions, competition among pretenders to office is sometimes resolved through extraconstitutional means. In the case of the parties and electoral cycles studied in this book, in the years following the Orange Revolution during which Ukraine implemented a closed-list PR system, consequential and extralegal intraparty violence—not only party-list compilation—defined some politicians’ availability for participation in politics. Such violence included the death of then-prime minister Viktor Yanukovych’s main competitor within the Party of Regions, an act with consequences that reverberate to the present day. Without reference to Ukraine’s context of informal interventions in party representation at that time, presentation of which can require extensive longitudinal knowledge of local landscapes, a reader unversed in the details of Ukrainian regional politics could struggle to evaluate, or to evaluate correctly, the relative salience of formal institutional change for the composition of party lists.
The evidence and argument presented in this book raise broader questions and complement a growing literature that critically examines the idea of regime types as stable categories of analysis. Moraski persuasively shows how Russia’s adoption of closed PR lists contributed to the development of one-party rule, and his analysis illustrates how parties can leverage shifts in electoral rules to consolidate power. In some places in his book, Moraski portrays the opportunistic use of electoral rule change as a reflection of party development under authoritarian rule. Yet in other places, especially in thinking about the implications of these changes for parliamentary elections in Russia in 2011, United Russia’s co-option of independent district deputies emerges as a factor driving Russia’s march toward authoritarianism. This begs a question about the nature of regime types as concepts: Are they something resembling Platonic forms, revealed by the conduct of politics, or are they better thought of as instantiated and reproduced through people’s choices? Both approaches to regime types as concepts are present in this book, but only the latter allows for historical contingency and agency—and for the possibility that even in a contemporary Russia seemingly unable to achieve escape velocity from its imperial and Stalinist pasts, something else could have happened.
With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the stakes of understanding political development in these two countries during the decades leading up to the war are high. As the consequences of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion reverberate around the globe and threaten state sovereignty and stability not only beyond Russia but also within it, future scholars will turn to the period Moraski examines to understand both the origins of Russia’s regime and the evolution of politics in Ukraine now characterized by both self-organized society-wide resistance and tightly coordinated, innovative communication strategies among its leadership. Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine identifies key watersheds in twenty-first-century party development in these two countries and the changes in formal institutions that led to them. The contributions of this book may become even more valuable as time wears on.
As important as Moraski’s findings are for understanding the role of formal institutional change in the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Russia and the destabilization of electoral politics in peacetime Ukraine, the book’s implications extend far beyond the two countries under study. Even as proponents of electoral reform in existing democracies argue that constitutional changes, including the adoption of PR systems, will bring about fairer outcomes, Moraski’s findings offer a cautionary tale: electoral reform alone will not prevent would-be authoritarians from adapting to capture control of political parties and electoral systems, even if the reforms in question were expected to produce more representative results. For as Anna Grzymała-Busse, Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, Daniel Ziblatt, and others have reminded us, institutions offer no panacea amid the erosion of norms protecting political competition; without deep work to maintain the societal foundations of that competition, electoral system change cannot protect democracies from ambitious politicians who seek to create one-party rule.
