Steve Smith
Russian Parliament

Overview

Q: Why don't we just begin by giving us just a brief synopsis of your research.

A: My work on the Russian Parliament began in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and new democratic institutions began to emerge in Russia. A colleague of mine, Tom Remington, is a Russian politics specialist and asked if I'd be interested joining him on a study of the new parliamentary institutions. I'm a specialist in the development of legislative institutions and so it was a natural match. We've pursued a series of projects related to the development of the new Russian parliament and so since 1991 we've been following developments there very closely. In 1993, this particular study more or less fell into our laps. A natural experiment was occurring, institutions were changing rapidly, and we happened to have funding and support for some surveys that would allow us to interview candidates for the new parliament, as well as some of the elected members after it organized itself. Our interests were motivated primarily by theories of development of the legislative institutions. In political science, these theories concern the motivations of the politicians who make choices about these legislative institutions and there are several competing theories about what motivates politicians as they shape the institutions in which they operate. One theory is that they do it out of their simple electoral interest, that in democracies politicians want to get reelected, and they shape their institutions in a way that maximizes their own chances of reelection and then pursuing their career in politics. An alternative theory, is that they have personal policy preferences, that is that they care about the policy choices, that the political institutions make, and they shape the institutions in a way to maximize the chance that their particular policy preferences will be realized in the official decisions of the institutions in which they operate. A third set of theories concern the role of political parties in democracies. Parties, of course, are teams of politicians who compete for elected office and compete for control over the policy choices made by political institutions. They're important because they create incentives for politicians to join forces with each other and perhaps make concessions to each other in the collective interest of the party. So, a party theory serves as an alternative to either a personal policy preference theory, or a personal electoral theory. Well with the change in legislative institutions from the old Soviet system to the new democratic institutions, Russian politicians were making choices about key features in their new parliament. This created an opportunity for us to test these competing theories of what motivates politicians when they shape these institutions. This is important in the larger literature because in our own literature we seek to develop a theory that is broadly applied, in many national or local contexts as well as over long periods of time and this gave us an opportunity to observe politicians in place making these choices. Now there was a very special opportunity here, with the funding we had for some surveys of these politicians we could avoid some problems that plague studies of politicians motivations generally. In general, we're not able to ask the politicians directly about what they're after as they're molding the institutions. Political elites are often times very difficult to interview, often times the events that we care most about occurred in the past, sometimes the distant past and so interviewing participants is impossible. And very frequently the politicians that we can interview are in fairly stable institutional settings where not too many new choices are being made about institutional arrangements. So, this was an opportunity to go out and interview politicians who were about to make very important choices about a very important set of political institutions, a fairly unique opportunity for social science. We decided to conduct a set of surveys; in this particular study we surveyed candidates for the parliament before the new parliament organized. In this way we could ask the politicians about their preferences about institutions and about public policies before they took office and before those institutional choices were made. It was a critical opportunity so that there preferences wouldn't be shaped by the eventual choices and then their preferences later rationalized in light of those choices. We could capture those choices before they actually confronted a set of votes about those institutional arrangements, and then we had the opportunity to follow that up with another survey, of the elected members of the parliament, to ask if, to determine whether these preferences had changed and whether or not in this new context having adopted these institutions, they had gained broader acceptability than they seemed to have had at first.

Q: The general question, general hypothesis motivated your study, but was there also an attempt, a desire to, understand and predict the Russian political system for the future?

A: Well, that's right. In fact the particular study I am discussing with you today, is part of a larger project that's now coming out in book form on the development of Russian parliamentary institutions. This is important because every democracy has as its central political institutions some form of parliamentary institution. So, understanding the emergence of the Russian democracy hinges in large part on an understanding of how that parliament evolves.

Theory

Q: You said that the study sort of fell into your lap, but there must have been some key research design decisions that you made. What were they and how did you make them?

A: Well, the most important research design question concerned we attribute political motivations to the politicians. We can easily learn what institutional choices they eventually made; the public record of the parliament makes that easy to determine. We can even determine the individual votes of legislators on those institutional arrangements. So, the dependent variable, that is what they ultimately chose or preferred was relatively easy to measure. But, their political motivations and their preferences about alternatives that were not explicitly posed in the parliament are difficult to measure. In many studies of institutional development or change, we're dependent on a public record, publicly expressed preferences or inferences from the behavior of the politicians about their attitudes and preferences. That creates serious problems of inference, and often times makes it impossible to distinguish between theories that actually predict the same behavior but for different reasons. By actually interviewing the politicians, we could get direct evidence of their attitudes and preferences about these institutional arrangements before they had to make these choices. So, the key question for us, from a research design point of view, was who to interview and when to interview them. And we did that by interviewing a large sample of candidates for the parliament in the fall of 1993 before the new parliament was organized.

Design

Q: How did you construct the sample? What was the universe and what was the sample size?

A: Well, there were several thousand candidates running for parliament in Russia and they have a complex electoral system, so we had to have a stratified sample that was actually fairly complicated. There are two sets of candidates. One set of candidates runs on a so-called party list in a proportional-representation system. In a proportional-representation system, parties get seats in the parliament roughly in proportion to the votes that their party receives in the election. Each party then constructs a list, and the number of candidates from their list that are actually placed in parliament depends on the number of votes they receive in the election. Half of the Russian parliaments' deputies or members are elected in that way. The other half is elected in the same way that they are in the United States, that is in single-member districts. A single member is elected from a single district. So the other half is elected in single-member districts. This actually presented a unique opportunity for us, because we were interested in determining whether or not the mode of election, through the proportional representation system on party lists or through single member districts, influenced their attitudes about the parliamentary institutions they were about to choose. Seldom in other democracies do we have parliamentarians elected through different modes of election. So, this was a unique opportunity to see if the incentives associated with the mode of election shaped their attitude about parliamentary institutions. So, we stratified the sample by making sure we had a large number of party-list candidates and large number of single-member district candidates. In each case we had to make sure we had a fairly representative sample of that group, and each sub-group posed problems of its own. In the case of the party list, we wanted to concentrate on those parties that were most likely to actually have elected deputies in the new parliament. For a party to get any representation in the parliament it had to reach a 5% threshold. Without gaining 5% of the vote, it would receive no seats in the parliament. So we had to make an educated guess about which of the parties would have representation in the new parliament, because it's their parliamentarians, of course, who would be making the choices about new institutional arrangements. And so there we selected on the basis of preliminary polls in the election campaign, which parties were most likely to receive representation and then we sampled their party lists. In the single member district side of course, these are geographically defined districts spread over the entire region of Russia. It's a huge place, communications are not always great, and there we tried to develop a stratified sample so that we made sure that we had a representative set of districts from various regions, regions with varying political composition to make sure that we had the range of candidates that we needed.

Q: Does each district in Russia have about the same number of people?

A: Yes, the districts in the Russian parliamentary elections are of roughly equal size. That wasn't so critical to us though because we were not interviewing a sample of voters, we were instead interviewing a sample of candidates who were running in those single-member districts. So, in the case of single member districts our job was to identify the candidates in advance, and then draw a random sample of these candidates from the stratified set of districts that we chose.

Q: What was your sample size for both of these samples?

A: Well, a little over 200 for both. We had a total of 420 candidates interviewed in the 1993 election campaign. The other part of the survey though was a survey of the elected deputies following the organization of the parliament. That was a much smaller sample of about 200, roughly half of the 450 members of the new Russian parliament that were interviewed. And they were interviewed on the basis of a similar sampling strategy. There, of course, we knew the identity of the parties that had representation in the parliament, so we took a representative sample, a stratified sample of the parties and then made sure that we had representation from both the party list candidates and the single member district candidates from each of those parties.

Q: How large is the parliament?

A: Parliament is 450 and it had roughly 8 parties at the time we did the interviews. So on average, the parties had about 50 or 60 members, some of them had a few more, some a few less.

Measurement

Q: Did you have a non-response problem? Were there people who refused to be interviewed?

A: Well, there was a bit of a problem, but it was remarkably small. We worked with a survey institute in Moscow, that had credibility with political elites in Russia. And their credibility helped us get interviews with many of those politicians. The other thing that worked to our advantage was how new this business of democracy was. The idea that there might even be social scientists out there were interested in what the candidates had to say was a bit of a novelty to many of them. So we had relatively good luck, I wouldn't expect to have such good luck in our response rate in the future.

Q: Do you remember what the response rate was?

A: It was over 90%, so we had a very high response rate.

Q: Were the people interviewed in multiple languages or just one language?

A: Russian is a fairly universal language within the Russian federation. Certainly, all political elites are fluent in Russian and Russian is the only language that's used in the parliament.

Q: Let's talk about measurement. How did you go about deciding on the questions to ask and how to operationalize them?

A: Well, we operationalized and we measured our key concepts in an iterative process. I wrote a first draft of our questionnaire and my collaborator and I worked over that questionnaire in great detail. We then shared it with the survey institute in Moscow, which is staffed by capable sociologists who assisted us in some of the interpretations. We had to translate some terms that aren't easily translated. And then they lent simply their own political experience-would these questions be meaningful to the politicians that we were interviewing. That process went back and forth, and then my collaborator and I spent some time in Moscow ourselves working in the parliament and conducting a set of fairly informal interviews in which we tried out some of these questions, especially the ones that we thought were problematic, with real live politicians in the parliament that existed previous to 1993. We made corrections and modified our questionnaire accordingly. But in the end of course we were not in a position to truly pretest our survey questionnaire in the field with a sub-group of candidates because the campaign was so condensed. It occurred over the course of just 6 or 7 weeks in very late 1993, so we had to go with the second best strategies for testing the questions.

Q: These interviews, were they conducted by telephone or in person?

A: As many as possible were conducted in person. But for some of the single member district candidates who were out in far eastern Russia they were conducted by telephone.

Q: How many questions were asked?

A: The interview generally took about 30 minutes to complete. The questions numbered about 45, which was cut down from the 60 or 70 that we would've liked to have asked. But we worked the questionnaire down to about 45 in order to reduce the interview to inside of 30 minutes.

Q: Were there any sensitive questions? For example, did you ask them what their annual income was or any questions that they refused to answer?

A: Well, I think there were some questions that were a bit sensitive. We were interested in asking them a set of questions beyond the scope of the study reported here about their relationships with their party. And this is a very sensitive question for many of the candidates. The reason it's sensitive is that many of them receive the endorsement of more than one party, and their relationships to those various parties was a subject that was of at least short term political sensitivity to them. Of course, we guaranteed anonymity in our use of the data to each of the interviewees. How credible they took our claim, that we would use the information without disclosing their identity, I'm not sure, because for many of them this was the first time they had ever been interviewed by a social scientist about anything like their relationship to a political party. You have to realize, I think, that in the communist system relationship to the party was a very, very sensitive matter. In most cases though, this wasn't a huge problem, in fact they gleefully took the opportunity to talk openly about their relationship to a political party in a new democracy.

Q: Did you promise them a report of the results of the study?

A: No, but we told them how they could get a summary of the results. We, of course, weren't quite sure what venue our publication would appear in, it turned out to appear in a major political science journal in this particular case. But it would not appear in Russian anywhere, and so would not be directly accessible to them. In place of the final report we promised to make available to them the marginals. That is the summary results on each of the questions for the survey from the Russian sociological institute that assisted us in the research.

Data Analysis

Q: Did the survey research center give you a computer file to work with or how did you do that part of the project?

A: We worked with the institute that did the surveying to develop a contract in advance of the conduct of the surveys. In that contract we specified most of the details of the survey, the number of interviewees, the nature of the sample that would be constructed, how we would approve of that sample, and then the way in which the data would be coded by the institute and then finally reported to us. In the end, they provided a Microsoft Excel file of the data that then we could use in many other ways.

Q: What kind of analysis did you do with the Excel file when you got it?

A: The first stage of the analysis was to screen the data, to make sure that it was clean, that there were not coding errors, and that we understood perfectly well how the institute working for us created the data file. The data file came in a standard Microsoft Excel file so we were able to use that Excel file to examine the variables. We did this by checking some of the original coding sheets, and comparing them with the data that appeared in the data file, and doing some simple frequency analysis to make sure that the responses corresponded with our understanding of Russian politics. And where we found problems or we thought there were problems, we followed up with correspondence to our collaborators in Moscow and worked through them to clean the data as appropriate. The second stage was to do a set of univariate, to calculate a set of univariate statistics on the data, to make sure that we understood exactly what kind of variation there was on each of the variables, to see if there were any surprises. Sometimes we discovered that there was less or greater variation on a variable than we anticipated. When there's little variation on a variable that we anticipated a great deal of variation on that creates important statistical problems so we wanted to identify those variables in advance. In addition, we knew that our political science audience for the study would be unfamiliar with many of the issues that were raised in the survey; even the substantive policy questions that we asked these candidates would be unfamiliar to many people in our audience. We wanted to be in a position to report some of these univariate statistics, simply to bring our academic audience up to speed on what was happening in Russian politics to help us set the context for the third stage. The third stage, which was multivariate analysis with the dependent variable being preferences about changes in the executive committee of the so-called council of the Duma of the new parliament. That typically was a dichotomous dependent variable so we had to use a multivariate analysis that allowed us to handle dichotomous dependent variables properly. In this case for a variety of technical reasons we chose logistic regression analysis, and then we estimated equations trying to predict attitudes about the new council of the Duma on the basis of their policy preferences, their electoral circumstances, and their party membership.

Q: What were the results of the multivariate logistic analysis?

A: Well, we did two types of analysis. We did one analysis for the candidates in the 1993 campaign, they of course were responding before these institutional choices were made. The second analysis was done of deputies who were questioned in 1994 after these institutional arrangements were chosen. In 1993 the candidates demonstrated very large differences in their preferences about a key feature of the new Russian parliament, the Council of the Duma. The Council of the Duma is the executive committee of the parliament. It sets the daily agenda and has a key role in making parliamentary decisions about the proceedings of the Duma. Every major legislative body has some agenda-setting mechanism and many have a committee that performs this function. The Council of the Duma was critical because the Council of the Duma represented a market change over the executive committee of the old Soviet-style parliament. In that old parliament they had an executive committee called the presidium, a strongly centralized hierarchical structure that dominated the old parliament and it was used as the means of control by the communist party during the Soviet era. It became very, very controversial because it became the location of the chief opponents to president Yeltsin in the period between 1991 and 1993. In 1993, Yeltsin dissolved that old parliament by force. The question was how would the new parliament organize itself, would it adopt that old centralized presidium structure or move to some yet unknown structure for organizing its internal affairs. So our dependent variable concerned the candidates' attitudes about the presidium: should it be changed or should it not be changed? And we determined in this analysis were that both policy preferences, whether or not you were a market democratic reformer or you preferred the old communist system, and your mode of election, whether or not you were elected on a party list or in single member districts, affected your attitude about the old presidium. Why? Well the communists that were up for election into the new parliament very much liked the old presidium structure. They expected to do well in the elections and they expected to be able to dominate the new parliament if it had a highly centralized leadership structure. So they favored the presidium under which of course they had faired fairly well over the years. The more democratic and market reform oriented candidates strongly preferred something other than the presidium. They weren't too specific during the campaign about what that alternative would be, but they knew very well that they didn't want that highly centralized hierarchical structure. On the electoral side, there were big differences. As in other systems, candidates that run on the party lists in the proportional representation side of election are very party-oriented. And they liked the idea of party leaders having a strong role in the process. So, while some of them didn't like the presidium, most of them still liked a strong role for party leaders in the agenda setting functions of the parliament. Single-member district candidates were very different. They're more independent minded, they're more oriented to their local districts and less to the national parties that they're affiliated with. And so they were least likely to like any form of strong centralized agenda setting function in the new parliament. So we discovered that both policy and electoral incentives played a role in structuring attitudes about the new parliamentary institutions.

Q: Did it take a long time to reach that conclusion, or was this fairly obvious the first time you looked at the results of your statistical analysis?

A: It showed up right away. This was really a question of good luck. Here the differences between these groups of legislators or candidates for the legislature were really quite large and even in simple bivariate relationships, simply comparing mode of election with preferences about the presidium, or comparing members or candidates of different policy preferences and contrasting their preferences about the presidium, we could see that these differences were large. But, because of the mode of election and policy preferences were correlated to a degree, we couldn't be certain that these relationships would hold up in a multivariate analysis when we controlled for the effects of both in trying to assess the independent impact of mode of election and policy preferences. It turns out that those differences held up just fine in the multivariate analysis and were very easy to determine.

Q: In the multivariate analysis did you control for other characteristics like geographic region, income, and so on?

A: Well we didn't, but we did look for those effects. In the final research report we did not show those effects for a couple of reasons. One is, that while we threw an awful lot of things into the analysis, there was not a good theoretical reason often for including them; it was just a hunch that they might have some effect and if we didn't find an effect, we preferred just to leave it out. We preferred to leave the final research report to the theoretical interests that we were pursuing. Some of those for which we had some reason to believe that there would be a relationship, we left out too because they were very strongly correlated with either mode of election or with policy preference. There are big regional differences in Russia in the political composition of the electorate and in the nature of the politicians that they elect, just as there are in the United States and elsewhere, and if we throw those variables in that are highly correlated with the variables that are of direct theoretical interests to us they'll contaminate the analysis and they're often times best left out.

Q: Did you ask any open-ended questions or were they all closed-ended questions?

A: These were all closed-ended questions really for two reasons. One was that we knew we would only have a few minutes with each interviewee and we didn't want to take the chance that they would take 5 or 10 minutes to answer a question and use up most of the time that we had with them. So, a closed-ended question was a better strategy for ensuring that the interview would be complete within the allotted time. The other consideration was a language problem. We knew that in the end that these questions would be coded and placed into a data set by our Russian collaborators and while we could've taken the raw results and coded them ourselves, that would have been a very tedious process and we preferred to rely on our language specialists in Russia to do that coding for us. Because we couldn't directly supervise that process we wanted to reduce any subjectivity in the coding process to an absolute minimum and that meant using closed-ended questions.

Q: It seems like your primary audience is the academic political science community. Did you have any other audiences that you had in mind as you were analyzing and interpreting the data?

A: Well, we did have other audiences, but I must confess that our primary audience was an academic audience. There is this emerging body of theory about how we explain institutional development and we saw this primarily as an opportunity to actually measure stages of institutional development in person; a rare opportunity in the development of modern democracies for social science. So that was our primary objective. However there were a couple of other audiences. One is a general audience that's interested in the process of democratization and the success of the Russian democracy in particular. We knew that there would be this larger audience and while we wouldn't report many of the technical features of our research to that larger audience, there would be outlets for our research in many, many ways to reach that larger audience. My collaborator, for example, maintains one of the standard textbooks on Russian politics and his textbook is very much informed by the research that we have been doing in collaboration with each other. There is another audience and that is a very specific audience, the U.S. government and other policy makers interested in Russian politics. Part of this study was in fact funded by an organization called the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies. It has since changed its name, but it is a State Department-funded organization which in turn funds academic studies of Eastern European countries. The NCSEER turns around and writes summary reports for the State Department upon request. Now this isn't highly sensitive information, and our research wasn't contaminated at all by that governmental interests; we were completely independent investigators, but we knew that there would be interest in the state department about the nature of the candidates running for office in Russia and the nature of the parliamentarians eventually elected to their parliament.

Interpretation

Q: You've published an article already in the American Journal of Political Science, have you written any articles for other sources?

A: We have written up our research mainly for political science journals. The American Journal of Political Science is one of the two major general journals in political science, and so it's always nice to be able to reach the broadest possible audience in your discipline by publishing in such a journal. We have published research reports in the Journal of Politics, which is a lesser journal but also is a general journal in the discipline. And we've published pieces in specialized journals like the Journal of Legislative Studies, which reaches a set of scholars primarily interested in legislative institutions, and we have published in Comparative Politics and Communist and Russian Studies journals as well.

Q: Do you know what the response from Russia, Russian scholars, Russian public, has been to the results of your study?

A: The Russian scholarly and more general audience for social science is very, very limited. Russia has a very, very small social science infrastructure at the present time. They did have a sociology discipline, which was a fairly encompassing discipline for the social sciences, in the Soviet era. The had scholars who were quite skilled in survey research, for example, and there are many standard textbooks and statistics in survey research written by Russian scholars for Russians in Russia. In political science there is a very, very small academic and public community there. Political science, because it dealt directly with politics, was not especially appreciated in the Soviet regime and most of the Russian political scientists who call themselves politologists, are newly minted, or sociologists who have since moved into political science and are not especially theoretical or sophisticated methodologically. So, we have a very small audience with them, but we do get requests for copies of our pieces and when we visit Moscow we usually bring copies of our published articles and distribute them to friends and its most appreciated. But there is not a large distribution in Russia. However, our studies have made us known to many Russian politicians, to many Russian political commentators, and to organizations that follow Russian politics in Moscow. So when we visit Moscow we frequently are asked to participate in programs that allow us to address some of the larger issues that then don't show up in our published research, and gives us an opportunity to address questions that aren't of direct theoretical or academic interest, and so far haven't appeared in our published articles.

Q: What do the results of your study say with regard to the future of democracy in Russia?

A: Well, one of the most important things that we've learned is that we in the social sciences have not fully captured the role of the parliament in the process of democratization. Parliaments in many democracies are belittled, they end up being minor policy making institution with chief executives and bureaucracies dominating the systems. But, what's little appreciated, we've discovered, is the role of parliament in providing an opportunity for political parties to organize. For politicians with a potential interest in developing a career in politics to find a place to get to know each other, to have a base of operations, to develop a constituency, to practice their rhetoric, to develop a policy program. Parliaments do that, even if the parliaments themselves end up having little influence over the direction of important public policies, they still have an important influence on the politicians they house. And those politicians are the ones who make the democracy work eventually. They form the parties, they mobilize the masses at election time, they conduct the democratic discourse about questions of state and public policy. And what we've really discovered is that these parliaments, that this particular parliament, even though it's sharply criticized by Russians, often belittled by western observers has proven to play a very critical role in the development of the Russian democracy so far.

Q: Do the results of your research have any immediate practical value for understanding American government?

A: Well, actually the reason we are studying the Russian parliament is that it gives us the opportunity to do things that we cannot do in the case of the United States Congress for example, or in the case of most western parliaments. The reason for that is that many of these key institutional choices are being made now while we can observe them and actually speak to the people who are making these choices. In most western parliaments these choices were made many decades ago before there was a social science very interested in these choices. So many of the players of course have passed away maybe centuries ago, many of the documents that would be critical to interpreting those events have been lost if they ever existed. The Russian case gives us an opportunity to avoid all of those mistakes. We can make sure that the documents are not lost, we can make sure that some things that are not officially documented are documented by us, and of course we could talk to the participants directly and sort out some of the explanations that are not possible to sort out in more historical studies.

Q: Now that you have done this research, what is the next study that should be done and are you going to do it?

A: Yes, our next step in this research program is a study of the relationships between this parliament and the president. The president of Russia has strong decree making power, and the conventional wisdom in Russia and in the west is that they have an autocratic system simply with an elected president in Boris Yeltsin. We've thought all along that that is a gross exaggeration of how the young Russian democracy actually works. What we discovered in some preliminary research was that number of laws made—that is through normal parliamentary means—roughly equaled the number of policies established by presidential decree. Well, this was news to nearly everyone who follows Russian politics very closely. So that simple fact led us to ask why can parliament manage to get a law adopted and enacted when the president could simply refuse to compromise and enact the policy by decree. Well, it turns out that the motivations of the players are a little bit more complicated than is often assumed. Yeltsin, the president, often times sees some advantage in enacting a law and parliament it turns out actually sees some advantage at times in allowing the president to act by decree. So we've devised a theory to explain the strategies of the players and we are pursuing a study to see if the conditions under which laws and decrees are made comports with that theory.
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