Federalism and Democratic Consolidation in Russia and Beyond.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role subnational elites played in building national political parties. The dissertation advances the existing literature on party building (Aldrich 1995, Chhibber and Kollman 2004, Hale 2006, Desposato and Scheiner 2008) in several respects. First, it brings to the foreground a set of actors--regional governors-- who have been previously ignored by the existing party-building literature. These actors have institutional resources, name recognition, and social capital that serve as the foundation for top-down construction of political parties because they become substitutes for mass-partisanship and salient socioeconomic cleavages that usually anchor political parties to the electorate. Second, it underscores the importance of political communication in the party building process, the value of which has escaped the existing literature on coalition maintenance in clientelistic regimes and/or dominant party states (Green 2007, Stokes 2005). Third, the dissertation advances scant literature on the quality of representation and governance in emerging democracies (Stoner-Weiss 1997).