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Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond. By Jessica Pisano. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022. xviii, 233 pp. Notes. Index. $125.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

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Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond. By Jessica Pisano. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022. xviii, 233 pp. Notes. Index. $125.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2024

Regina Smyth
Regina Smyth*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Slavic Review , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , Fall 2023 , pp. 780 - 784
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Jessica Pisano's focus on the everyday political economy of electoral participation in Staging Democracy makes an insightful contribution to the literature on state management of elections and protest across regime types. Based on a framework grounded in dramatic theory, Pisano relies on evidence from the post-Soviet empire states to show how state actors engage citizens in political performances that project regime support and mask the effects of economic precarity and state dependence on patterns of political participation.

Producers, Directors, Actors, and the Audience

Staging Democracy is based on Pisano's long-term ethnographic study of political behavior in rural and small-town communities in Russia and Ukraine. These groups are notoriously understudied. Fieldwork is arduous and public opinion polls based on national samples do not have the statistical power to look inside these communities. As a result, citizens outside urban centers are characterized as unitary, conservative, and easily led despite growing evidence of different attitudes and economic coping strategies.Footnote 1 Pisano's research methods challenge these assumptions, demonstrating that elections and protest actions are embedded in long histories of performative interactions between state and society and the practices of everyday life.

This research focus yields an important argument: economic vulnerability wrought by the introduction of capitalism enabled elites to exploit precarity to win elections and orchestrate pro-regime activism. Voters do not crave paternalism or a strong hand; they want their lights to stay on and their apartments repaired, and they exchange their votes for services.

Pisano adapts a dramatic theory framework to understand state strategies that constrain societal actors. This approach is more than a metaphor. She relies on different understandings of theater to capture the relational aspects of electoral competition, defining stakeholders and their power to shape outcomes. Producers (those in control of electoral processes) and directors (those who implement these processes) orchestrate political actions. The voters shift between audience, led by the arc of the electoral story, or bit players with limited choice left to comply with incumbent demands.

The framework relies on the Aristotelian and Brechtian approaches to dramaturgy to generate relationships among stakeholders. State reliance on the Aristotelian strategy builds community, as the state leads its voters through a story, a plot that triggers emotions and undermines autonomy. In contrast, protest resembles epic theater that challenges participants to act together to solve problems. Often coopted by the state, protest gives the illusion of voice while identifying good and bad constituencies, acceptable and unacceptable action. These interactions relegate protest, and protesters, to the realm of an imagined future and away from tangible change. Pisano's approach, laid out in the early chapters of the book, is intriguing, although theoretic scaffolding is less visible in empirical chapters, leaving the reader to sort out how it operates in daily life.

The book addresses the puzzle of why citizens overlook illiberal electoral practices within democratic regime structures. Elites equate elections with choice, and even if voters understand that choice is constrained, they accept it because they are engaged in performing their collective role and obtaining resulting benefits. Equally important, the study stresses variation in citizens’ experiences depending on where they live, their position in the economic structure, and their dependence on the state. This variation exists within neighborhoods and towns, fragmenting the meaning of citizenship across and within states and creating pockets of illiberalism that have disproportionate impact on national politics.

Pisano's analysis of protest as theater is more limited. Her core cases, the Immortal Regiment and state repression following the For Fair Elections protest in Russia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine effectively illustrate state cooptation of activism. Yet, the analysis does not recognize that these events resulted in resources, skills, networks,Footnote 2 and the creation of new identities that transcend ethnicity, language, and regionalism.Footnote 3 Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity is presented as an exception in this regard, ignoring differences in levels of effect across contexts. While the creative urban class initiated some of the most visible Eurasian protest episodes, labor unrest and local actions often reflect grassroots concerns. As Carine Clement convincingly showed, local actions were rooted in everyday grievances around housing, healthcare, and land use.Footnote 4 The chapters in our recent edited volume, Varieties of Russian Activism, demonstrates the complexity of local activism as citizens span urban and rural communities to solve common problems.Footnote 5

The Argument in Context: Building Constituencies after 1991

Pisano's innovative argument shares a good deal with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova's The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity that also emphasizes legacy, leadership, and political strategy.Footnote 6 Both Pisano and Sharafutdinova look beyond easy answers to explain post-Soviet societal attitudes: moral bankruptcy, brainwashing by state television, or the desire for strong leadership. They diverge on the drivers of political community-building. Sharafutdinova adopts a social identity perspective to explain the emergence of Russia's national community, bound by common identity. Red Mirror explores the resuscitation of core Soviet ideas such as exceptionalism and the common enemy that underpin shared feelings of pride and belonging. This approach is supported by studies on the evolution of state narrativesFootnote 7 and state performance of identity and history that make ideas available to mass publics.Footnote 8

Pisano's study also resonates with research on electoral competition and state-building that explores the causes of variation in state capacity to forge national constituencies.Footnote 9 Staging Democracy speaks to the limits of authoritarians who do not control the resources necessary to unify the national political space—a theme developed in Pauline Jones's book on resources and electoral institutions in Central Asia.Footnote 10 Cole Harvey's research on electoral malfeasance is an important reminder of how variation in state resources shape the capacity to determine vote counts.Footnote 11 These arguments speak to new research exploring the incoherent nature of post-Soviet states, Russia's resulting “bad governance,” and Ukraine's persistent corruption.Footnote 12

Staging Democracy also challenges institutionalist theories of political competition. Yet, Timothy Frye's overview of the institutionalist literature, Weak Strongman, highlights how institutions structure political theater by defining the frequency and nature of interactions, community boundaries, and constraints on opposition actors.Footnote 13 Similarly, the second generation of party system research in Eurasia considered the durability of communist-legacy partiesFootnote 14 and the role of hegemonic state partiesFootnote 15 that change the currency of political bargains that bring state resources to bear directly on electoral competition. All these state interventions influence the shape of constituencies, sometimes acting as a centralizing force and sometimes devolving electoral control and strengthening regional leaders.

Placing Staging Democracy in a brief overview of the literature clarifies both the complementarities, tensions, and questions raised by the work. It also suggests Pisano's most important contribution to our field: defining a path for future research exploring the effects of class, precarity, and inequality on political development. Most critically, Pisano's comparative, cross-regime approach and joint foci on political theater and everyday political economy suggests a lens to understand the role of precarity on support for and participation in Russia's escalation of war, the divergence of political behavior in occupied territories, and remarkable Ukrainian unity after 2014.Footnote 16

References

1. For examples of labor response to market pressures see Crowley, Stephen, Putin's Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar; Morris, Jeremy, Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins (Basingstoke, Eng., 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, Jeremy, “The Informal Economy and Post-Socialism: Imbricated Perspectives on Labor, the State, and Social Embeddedness,” in “Supp. Russia's Informal Economy: A Special Issue” of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 27, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 9–30Google Scholar.

2. Dollbaum, Jan Matti, “When Does Diffusing Protest Lead to Local Organization Building? Evidence from a Comparative Subnational Study of Russia's ‘For Fair Elections’ Movement,” Perspectives on Politics 20, no. 1 (March 2022): 53–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Regina, Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020 (Cambridge, Eng., 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zelinska, Olga, “How Social Movement Actors Assess Social Change: An Exploration of the Consequences of Ukraine's Local Maidan Protests,” International Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2021): 284–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. For detailed discussions of the mechanisms of social change related to the Orange Revolution and Revolution of Dignity see Brudny, Yitzhak M. and Finkel, Evgeny, “Why Ukraine is not Russia: Hegemonic National Identity and Democracy in Russia and Ukraine,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011): 813–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kulyk, Volodymyr, “National Identity in Ukraine: Impact of Euromaidan and the War,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (June 2016): 588–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Onuch, Olga, Mapping Mass Mobilization: Understanding Revolutionary Moments in Argentina and Ukraine. (Basingstoke, Eng., 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Regina, “Considering the Orange Legacy: Patterns of Political Participation in the Euromaidan Revolution,” Post-Soviet Affairs 34, no. 5 (September, 2018): 297–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Clement pioneered work on local activism: Karine Clément, “From ‘Local’ to ‘Political’: The Kaliningrad Mass Protest Movement of 2009–2010 in Russia,” in Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe (London, 2016), 163–93.

5. Jeremy Morris, Andrei Semenov, and Regina Smyth, Varieties of Russian Activism: State-society Contestation in Everyday Life (Bloomington, IN., 2023).

6. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity (Oxford, 2020); see also Sharafutdinova, The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus (London, 2023).

7. Olga Malinova, “Legitimizing Putin's Regime: The Transformations of the Narrative of Russia's Post-Soviet Transition,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 55, no. 1 (March 2022): 52–75.

8. For compelling examples see: Katie L. Stewart, “Cultural Production as Activism: National Theaters, Philharmonics, and Cultural Organizations in Russia's Regional Capitals,” in Morris, Smyth, and Semenov, eds., Varieties of Russian Activism, 31–52; and Elizabeth A. Wood, “Performing Memory: Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of World War II in Russia,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 172–200.

9. Both Pisano and I speak to this issue on our earlier work: Jessica Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge, Eng., 2008); Regina Smyth, Candidate Strategies and Electoral Competition in the Russian Federation: Democracy without Foundation (Cambridge, Eng., 2006).

10. Pauline Jones, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts. (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).

11. Cole J. Harvey, “Principal–Agent Dynamics and Electoral Manipulation: Local Risks, Patronage and Tactical Variation in Russian Elections, 2003–2012,” Europe-Asia Studies 72, no. 5 (May 2020): 837–62.

12. Vladimir Gel΄man, The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia (Ann Arbor, MI, 2022), 312; Jeremy Morris, “Russia's Incoherent State,” Current History 118, no. 810 (October 2019): 251–57; and Vladimir Gel΄man and Margarita Zavadskaya, “Exploring Varieties of Governance in Russia: In Search of Theoretical Frameworks,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, 6 (July 2021): 971–88; on Ukraine, see: Henry E. Hale and Robert W. Orttung, eds., Beyond the Euromaidan: Comparative Perspectives on Advancing Reform in Ukraine (Stanford, 2016); Serhiy Kudelia, “The Sources of Continuity and Change of Ukraine's Incomplete State,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 45, nos. 3–4 (September-December 2012): 417–28.

13. Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (Princeton, 2021).

14. Anna Maria Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 2002); Grzymala-Busse, “Hoist on Their Own Petards? The Reinvention and Collapse of Authoritarian Successor Parties,” Party Politics 25, no. 4 (July 2019): 569–82.

15. Ora John Reuter, The Origins of Dominant Parties: Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2017). The process was different in Ukraine: Masatomo Torikai, “Remnants of the ancien régime: Renomination and Re-election of Former Members of a Demised Ruling Party in Ukraine,” Democratization 29, no. 7 (February 2022): 1249–67.

16. Comparative work builds on excellent existing studies: Nina Averianova and Tetiana Voropaieva, “Transformation of the Collective Identity of Ukrainian Citizens After the Revolution of Dignity (2014–2019),” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, no. 7 (2020), 45–71; Serhiy Kudelia and Johanna van Zyl, “In My Name: The Impact of Regional Identity on Civilian Attitudes in the Armed Conflict in Donbas,” Nationalities Papers 47, no. 5 (September 2019): 801–21; Andrew Wilson, “The Donbas in 2014: Explaining Civil Conflict Perhaps, but Not Civil War,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (April 2016): 631–52.