Publications

In order to understand Russia's regime we should study the interaction of formal and informal, of charismatic and clientelistic politics, of security politics and loyalty, of insecurity and mobilization, the repertoire of feudal politics and the political economy of state monopolistic capitalism. Standard typologies such as »deficient democracy« or »hybrid regime« as well as »competitive authoritarianism« suffer from describing authoritarian regimes with the semantics of a deficit. Putin's regime meets essential criteria of a control regime which is characterized by governmental control and domination of the contingency of political action and outcomes, by centralization of political power and resource allocation, an extractive behavior towards governmentally controlled resources and services as well as the tendency to turn political questions into security issues.

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