Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, May 27, 2011

And the winner will be...

Joshua Tucker, Associate Professor of Politics at New York Univeristy, offers some ideas about next year's election.

Guarantee: One of These Two Will Win the 2012 Presidential Election…

As was the case four years ago, a year out from the presidential election we still have some uncertainty who will emerge victorious. Similarly to four years ago, this presidential election will not be determined at the ballot box, but instead in pre-election jockeying to see who ends up on the ballot. Unlike four years ago, however, we know now the winner will be one of two people: Dmitry Medvedev or Vladimir Putin…

That being said, things are once again getting interesting in Russia. I have previously pointed readers to RFE/RL’s excellent Russian politics blog, the Power Vertical. In a series of recent posts (see here, here, and here for example), the blog’s author Brian Whitmore has made the argument that a number of recent developments in Russia should at the very least suggest that the standard wisdom that Putin runs everything and Medvedev is simply a puppet needs to come under some serious scrutiny. This is not to say that Putin is devoid of power in Russia – he isn’t – or that Medvedev is running the show alone – he isn’t – but that there are numerous indicators that Medvedev does not simply intend to go quietly into the shadows with Putin returning to serve as Russia’s president in 2012…

Even if Putin is going to be in the background (attempting?) to continue pulling the strings, the fact that Medvedev may remain president is likely to have consequences. Of course, such a claim is dependent on Putin and Medvedev actually having different visions of how Russia ought to evolve over the next six years. Their perceived differences (or lack thereof) has long been a subject of discussion in the media and among pundits, but it is also the subject of a recent report by Mark Urnov of the Moscow Higher School of Economics entitled Modernization in Russia: Clash of Concepts…

For those interested in getting beyond the “horse-race” nature of the Putin vs. Medvedev contest for the 2012 Russian presidential election, it is an interesting read with some useful insights as to what the policy consequences of the 2012 presidential election “results” – and I use that word with explicit recognition of its particular meaning in the Russian context – might turn out to be.

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Labels: leadership, politics, Russia