Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia

Stephen E. Hanson

Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of postimperial democracya situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state authoritarianism in Russiavary dramatically. These divergent results reflect the impact of new ideologies, which generated collective action among converts by artificially elongating their time horizons in an environment of extremely high uncertainty. In France, ideological clarity allowed radical republicans to outflank more pragmatic parties; in Germany, ideological clarity allowed the Nazis to mobilize more successfully than centrist parties; and in post-Soviet Russia, the absence of any compelling new political ideology democratic or antidemocratichas rendered political parties too weak to challenge even a very weak state. Keywords: ideology; political parties; nationalism

The arrest and detention of Russian oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky by FSB special forces on 25 October 2003, followed by the overwhelming victory of the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party in the December 2003 Duma elections and Putins subsequent campaignwithout any real oppositionfor reelection in March 2004, has sparked renewed debate about the current state and future prospects of Russias fragile post-Soviet democracy. To some scholars, these developments seemed to indicate a dramatic shift toward an authoritarian regime dominated by the Kremlin and the so-called siloviki, that is, representatives of the FSB and military.1
1. Michael McFaul, Vladimir Putins Grand Strategy . . . for Anti-Democratic Regime Change in Russia, The Weekly Standard, 9:10, 17 November 2003.
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 20, No. 2, pages 343372. ISSN 0888-3254 2006 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1177/0888325406287176

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Another group of analysts agreed that Putins move against Khodorkovsky and the taming of the Duma marked a significant change but argued that it was a salutary one, eliminating the remnants of the corrupt and debilitating oligarchical rule of the Yeltsin era.2 Finally, some commentators portrayed the events of 2003-4 as merely the first phase of a long-term struggle to decide the nature of the Russian political system in 2008the year that President Putin would be constitutionally obliged to step down from his post.3 Ironically, following a period when the majority of Russia watchers had concluded that the Putin regime had finally brought stability to the countrysymbolized by the upgrading by Moodys of Russias sovereign debt to investment grade statusRussian politics suddenly appeared as enigmatic and unpredictable as ever. Our surprise at the continuing uncertainty of Russian politics, well into the second decade of the post-Soviet era, betrays a lack of sufficient perspective to grasp the true immensity of the social, economic, and cultural changes under way in the wake of the collapse of communism in Europe and Eurasiaparticularly in the center of the former Soviet empire, where Leninist political rule and Stalinist socioeconomic institutions were enforced for more than six decades. In such a situation, comparative historical analysis of post-Soviet Russian democracy would seem a useful antidote to the sort of instant analysis typical of much post-Sovietology.4 In this essay, I propose to analyze the Russian Federation since 1990 as one of the relatively few historical cases of postimperial democracy, that is, a situation in which new democratic regimes are born in the wake of the defeat and quick collapse of formally imperial polities and where reasonably fair and open democratic elections are held for at least a decade after the imperial collapse.5 In particular, I will focus here on the first 15 years of the Third
2. Lewis Lehrman, The Case for Putin: Dont Write off Russias President, The Weekly Standard, 9:14, 22 December 2003. 3. Svetlana Babaeva and Georgy Bovt, 2004-2008 Program, Izvestiia, 16 March 2004, pp. 1-3, translated in Johnsons Russia List #8120, Center for Defense Information. 4. Stephen E. Hanson, Sovietology, Post-Sovietology, and the Study of Postcommunist Democratization, Demokratizatsiya 11, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 142-49. 5. Other cases that could be added to the list of postimperial democracies would be Austria and Hungary after World War Isince both were cores of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Portugal in 1974. Cases in which national sovereignty was gained through the defeat of foreign empires, such as interwar Poland, and where empire collapsed only gradually, as in twentieth-century Britain and France, pose rather different theoretical issues.

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Republic in France (1870-85), the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918-33), and post-Soviet Russia (1990-2005). In all three of these cases, the continuation of formal democracy well after the initial period of social chaos generated by imperial defeat led to a distinct environment of prolonged uncertainty governing key institutional features of the new regimeincluding constitutions, electoral rules, national symbols, and national bordersbefore the eventual consolidation of a new regime type. However, the particular regimes consolidated in these three casesrepublican, democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state authoritarianism in Russiawere dramatically different. I will argue that none of the leading explanations for institutional outcomes in post-Soviet Russiapoorly designed formal institutions (and in particular, semipresidentialism), legacies of the past empire, and antidemocratic political culturecan by themselves explain these diverse regime outcomes in the Third Republic, Weimar, and post-Soviet cases. Indeed, all of these factors, I will show, were present in similar ways in all three of these postimperial democracies. Instead, a factor largely ignored by comparative historical analysis to date, political ideology, can be shown to be the key independent variable that generated coherent political parties that proposed viable alternative regimes in two of these three cases. Ideology, I argue, generates collective action among party activists by artificially elongating the time horizons of ideological converts in an environment where rational actors must necessarily have high discount rates in evaluating potential future payoffs for political action. In France, ideological clarity allowed radical republicans and legitimists to outflank more pragmatic parties; the victory of the republicans generated an institutionalized republican polity that endured for seven decades. In Germany, ideological clarity allowed the Nazi and Communist Parties to mobilize more successfully than the centrist parties of the Weimar Coalition; the victory of the Nazis generated a genocidal dictatorship. In the case of post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, the absence of any compelling new political ideologywhether democratic or antidemocratichas generated a situation in which all political parties are too weak to challenge even a very weak state. Thus, the situation East European Politics and Societies 345

in Russia today is likely to culminate neither in consolidated democracy nor in consolidated fascism but rather in a novel form of weak state authoritarianismwith unpredictable consequences for the geopolitical future of Eurasia. Explanations for Russian semidemocracy Clearly, in the wake of recent events, no serious analyst can argue today that Russian democracy is fully consolidated. For some, however, the entire subject of democratic consolidation is misleading. Some cynics (including President Putin himself, in a fall 2003 address at Columbia University) simply argue Russia has never really been democratic; from this perspective, Russian politics since 1990 has been nothing more than a struggle to see who would control the post-Soviet Russian state. Adherents of this point of view, however, forget that even if Russian formal democracy has been frequently imperfect or even, in some cases, marred by outright fraud, such democratic institutions as the 1993 constitution, parliamentary and presidential elections, and formal legislation passed by the Federal Assembly have all played crucial roles in post-Soviet politics. Others accept the importance of such democratic institutions as parliaments, elections, and law but argue that the term consolidation imposes a misleading teleology on the process of democratization in Russia (and elsewhere) and should be abandoned.6 Doing so, however, leaves us with no widely accepted conceptual framework to analyze the dynamic trajectory of Russian semidemocratic politics from Yeltsin to Putin. To insist that Russia through 2003 (though perhaps not beyond) has been an unconsolidated democracy thus has some important analytic advantagesas long as the term consolidation can be reasonably clearly defined. In a recent essay, I have argued that democratic consolidation must be defined as a subtype of regime consolidationand that our failure to look at the mechanisms by which various forms of authoritarianism get consolidated as we theorize about democratic
6. Guillermo ODonnell, Illusions about Consolidation, Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (April 1996): 34-51.

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consolidation has been a major shortcoming of the comparative democratization literature to date.7 Regime consolidation, I have suggested, can be understood as a situation in which the enforcers of state institutions can be expected with high probability to obey the commands of state elites. Democratic consolidation is a type of regime consolidation in which state staff can be expected consistently to enforce and defend state institutions guaranteeing electoral competition, citizen participation, and civic definitions of the boundaries and membership of the polity. By this definition, Russia in Putins first term was (barely) a formal democracy but one that was moving away from consolidation and, during his second term, possibly toward a type of formal (but equally unconsolidated) autocracy. Why, well over a decade after the collapse of communism, is this the case? The first, and by far the most common, explanation for Russias lack of democratic consolidation is based on an institutionalist approach to comparative analysis. Scholars in this camp point in particular to the institutional problems of mixed presidential-parliamentary systems, particularly when presidential power is, as in Russia, so overwhelming by comparison with the legislature and judiciary.8 Strong presidential power, such theorists argue, damages the prospects for democratic consolidation in several ways at once: it undermines the importance of the legislature and thus of political parties, encouraging irresponsible forms of parliamentary politics, it leaves significant social interests without avenues for representation in national policy making, and it facilitates the ability of the executive branch to declare states of emergency and to shut down democratic politics altogether. The transition from Yeltsins irresponsible and erratic superpresidentialism to Putins semiauthoritarian version
7. Stephen E. Hanson, Defining Democratic Consolidation, in Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, ed. Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip Roeder, 126-51 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8. See, for example, M. Steven Fish, The Dynamics of Democratic Erosion, in Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, ed. Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip Roeder, 54-95 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarianism versus Presidentialism, World Politics 46, no. 1 (1993): 1-21; and John Carey and Matthew Shugart, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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is thus the predictable result of poorly designed formal democratic institutions. Seen in the light of our comparison with the two earlier postimperial democracies, however, the formal institutionalist argument becomes more problematic. In fact, both the early Third Republic and Weimar Germany were also political systems in which the scope of presidential power was undefined and potentially open to antidemocratic abuse. In the case of France, the first several years of democracy witnessed a prolonged struggle over the powers of the executive, and the battle over whether the Third Republic would be parliamentary or presidential was not decided until the defeat of General MacMahon after his effort to dissolve the National Assembly in 1877. In the case of Germany, too, the powers of the presidency, and in particular, the role of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowing the president to bypass parliament in states of emergency, were not clearly defined until the economic crisis of the Great Depression led President Hindenberg to invoke these formal powers in 1930. Even in Russia, we should remember, the emergency powers of President Yeltsin in 1992 were originally set to expire in one year, returning the Russian Federation to a system of parliamentary sovereignty based on the Soviet-era constitution; the formal system of semipresidentialism currently in place was established only after Yeltsins military assault on the Supreme Soviet in 1993. Yet, as we have seen, regime outcomes in these three cases were utterly different: consolidated democracy in France by the mid-1880s, consolidated fascism in Germany by 1934, and unconsolidated authoritarianism in Russia at a comparable developmental stage. A second school of thought in post-communist studies downplays the causal significance of formal political institutions, instead arguing that the legacies of various types of communism (and of precommunist regimes as well) are the crucial factor explaining the diverse democratic, semidemocratic, and autocratic outcomes in post-communist Europe and Eurasia.9 The extent to which different parts of the post-communist region
9. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Stephen E. Hanson, The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change, Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 2 (July 1995): 306-14; and Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-party Cooperation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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have been burdened by the aftereffects of Leninist one-party rule and the concomitant suppression of civil society, of Stalinist collectivization of agriculture and industrial planning, and of the cultural aftermath of communist redefinitions of national and ethnic identities seems to correlate remarkably well with the success or failure of the democratic project in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet republics.10 Even formal institutions themselves may be the results of preexisting structural factors rather than independent causal variables in their own right; where communist party bureaucracies remained well organized and rooted in agricultural sectors of the economy, presidential and/or authoritarian rule was more likely than in places where communist elites split before the Soviet collapse and economic modernization was more advanced.11 From the legacies perspective, neither Russias initial moves toward competitive democracyreflecting internal cleavages in highly urbanized and industrialized Soviet Russia nor its inability to consolidate democracydue to its particularly burdensome political, socioeconomic, and cultural legacies from the communist pastshould surprise us. The legacies approach to analyzing post-communist institutional change, in my view, represents an important advance over theorizing that focuses solely on the impact of formal institutions. Yet as the most recent analyses of the effects of Leninist legacies have shown, structural variables by themselves are insufficient to account for the full range of regime types formed since the revolutions of 1989-91; agency, too, must in some way be taken into account.12 Our comparison of Third Republic France, Weimar
10. Clifford Gaddy, The Price of the Past: Russias Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996); Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Anna Gryzmala-Busse and Pauline Jones Luong, Reconceptualizing the State: Lessons from Postcommunism, Politics and Society 30, no. 4 (2002): 529-54. 11. Gerald Easter, Preference for Presidentialism: Postcommunist Regime Change in Russia and the NIS, World Politics 49, no. 2 (1997): 184-211; and Philip Roeder, The Rejection of Authoritarianism, in Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, ed. Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip Roeder, 11-53 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 12. Pauline Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, eds., Time, Space, and Institutional Change in

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Germany, and post-Soviet Russia makes this clear, since again, in all three cases, legacies of past imperial institutions constrained postimperial democratic elites in strikingly similar ways. In the case of France, the authoritarian Second Empire left behind administrative bureaucracies trained in the Napoleonic tradition of hostility to independent civil society, a military that chafed at its defeat by the Prussians and distrusted the radicalism of the parliamentary opposition, and a bourgeoisie accustomed to dependence on, and political deference to, the state. Based on past legacies alone, one would have predicted not the victory of radical republicans but the restoration of some sort of alliance between the military and the Orlanist bourgeoisie. In the case of Germany, the defeat of the Kaiserreich in World War I left behind similar legacies of imperial militarization, state-led industrialization, and widespread cultural hostility to democracy, which was seen in many quarters as a tool for the suppression of German national greatness. Yet the two parties with the most effective network of party activists and grassroots supporters, by the time of the Great Depression, were the Nazis and Communistsneither of which existed before 1914 and which remained politically marginal until the very end of the 1920s. Finally, in Russia, a legacies explanation can certainly help pinpoint the formidable institutional and cultural obstacles to democratic consolidation but cannot so easily explain why there has not been any consolidation of authoritarian rule either. Indeed, from the perspective of Leninist legacies alone, one might have expected the simple restoration of the key institutions of Soviet-style communismas proposed by Zyuganov and his relatively well-organized Communist Party of the Russian Federationinstead of the genuinely competitive struggle for power within formal democratic rules that has taken place for the past decade. Thus, France, Germany, and Russia alike inherited semimodernized, statist economies with significant bases of social support for military and/or authoritarian politicsyet regime outcomes in the three cases differed fundamentally.

Postcommunist Europe, in Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, 15-48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15-48.

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This brings us to a third widespread theory purporting to explain the failure of Russian democracy to consolidate: the cultural approach. There are many variants here, ranging from the civilizational view that differences in the value orientations of Russian Orthodoxy and Western Christianity account for greater deference to state authority and weaker civil society in Orthodox countries13 to the argument that among the various legacies of communism that now thwart democratization, the cultural legacies of weak civil society and widespread political alienation are the most significant.14 In the contemporary period, such phenomena as Putins restoration of Soviet-era symbols such as the Soviet national anthem and the red flag; the genuine popularity of both Putin and, to some extent, even the slavishly pro-Putin United Russia party; and the increasing skepticism among Russians about both democracy and the liberal capitalist West have made cultural arguments about Russian de-democratization increasingly appealing. Such cultural theorists can seemingly account quite easily for the difference between consolidated democracies in Western Europe and unconsolidated democracies further east. Here, too, however, an examination of our other two historical cases of postimperial democracy casts doubt on the cultural hypothesis. The success of French democracy since World War II has led most analysts today to emphasize the famously democratic elements of the French political tradition dating from the French Revolution of 1789 with its triumphant proclamation of libert, egalit, fraternit. But in 1870, after the defeat of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War, contemporary assessments of French political culture were far less sanguine. Indeed, the first century since the French Revolution had seen the triumph of Napolon, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the establishment of a slightly more liberal monarchy, the election of Napolons autocratic nephew, and the creation of a Second
13. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Russell Bova, Political Culture, Authority Patterns, and the Architecture of the New Russian Democracy, in Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? Explorations in State-Society Relations, ed. Harry Eckstein, Frederic J. Fleron Jr., Erik P Hoffman, and William M. Reisinger, 177-200 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). . 14. Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Empire. Brief periods of republicanism after 1789 and 1848 had led quickly to street violence, terror, and brutal repression. Even after the establishment of the Third Republic, respected scholars argued that the French tendency toward hierarchy and Utopianism in politics accounted for that regimes frequent scandals and crises as well as widespread disaffection with republican rule.15 Until quite recently, most analyses of German political culture, too, have emphasized that countrys tendencies toward anti-Semitism and authoritarianism and pointed out the relative weakness of German liberalism16although a more recent historiography emphasizes the importance of Germanys parliamentary tradition from the nineteenth century onward.17 Thus, as in the case of France, Germanys political culture during the Weimar period contained a mixture of authoritarian and democratic elements. Even in Russia, the emergence of significant antiregime protest from below in the last years of Gorbachevs rule led a number of analysts to conclude that democratic impulses had triumphed within Russias civil society; only in the latter half of the 1990s did most analysts of Russian culture become truly pessimistic.18 In short, the political cultures of France, Germany, and Russia during the postimperial periods were arguably more similar than different. If so, the explanation for varying regime outcomes must lie elsewhere. Ideas and ideologies in comparative politics The argument of this essay is simple: regime outcomes in the early French Third Republic, Weimar Germany, and post-Soviet Russia can
15. Stanley Hoffmann et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); and Maurice Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 16. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 17. Marcus Kruezer, Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy: France and Germany, 1870-1939 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 18. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Timothy McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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be traced to the formal ideologies of the most successful political parties in each of these initially uncertain democracies. In postimperial France in the 1870s, the two most successful political parties were the legitimists and the republicans; after the final defeat of the former in 1877, the republican party was able to reorient the staff of the state bureaucracies and military to defend democratic elections, participatory institutions, and criteria for citizenship (for men, at least). In postimperial Weimar Germany, the two most successful parties, by the early 1930s, were the Nazis and the Communists; in 1933, the Nazi party took power and consolidated a totalitarian, and ultimately genocidal, state. Finally, in post-Soviet Russia by the Putin era, no political parties were able to sustain their commitments to coherent ideological principles, and as a result, no new regime type could be consolidated well over a decade after the Soviet imperial collapse. This seemingly simple argument, however, can be sustained against the competing explanations above only after a great deal of preliminary conceptual and methodological work. The longstanding bias in social science in favor of materialist epistemologies and ontologies puts the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of more idea-oriented theorists. Indeed, idea-based explanations for social outcomes often do suffer from problems of conceptual fuzziness, methodological indeterminacy, and inadequate attention to causal mechanismssadly reinforcing the worst fears of the social science materialist mainstream. To begin with, scholarship on the causal impact of ideas must begin by making clear, conceptual definitions of diverse types of ideational variables.19 Far too often, such terms as ideology, culture, ideas, worldviews, and schemas are used interchangeably in the literature, even though scholars using these terms may intuitively wish to highlight quite different empirical phenomena and processes.20 Moreover, in reading the literature using any one of the above terms, one is struck by the multiplicity of competing definitions they are givena situation
19. Sheri Berman, The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 20. Stephen E. Hanson, From Culture to Ideology in Comparative Politics: A Review Essay, Comparative Politics 35 (April 2003): 355-86.

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obviously hindering social science cumulation and reinforcing the dominance of materialist views. Since the independent variable in this analysis is ideology, we must then be careful to distinguish the use of this concept here from earlier definitions in the scholarly literature. In particular, I wish to differentiate my use of the term ideology from earlier works defining ideology as worldview, as flawed thinking, or as position on a left-right scale. The first of these definitionsof ideology as a worldview, belief system, or shared mental modelis by far the most widespread.21 Indeed, the notion of an ideology as a worldview is ubiquitous to the point of becoming a part of ordinary language. But such a fuzzy definition is unlikely to help us very much in exploring the empirical impact of specific political ideologies in concrete historical situations. For one thing, it is difficult to imagine any political elite with no worldview or shared mental model whatsoever. Nonideological politicians, by this definition, would literally have to approach their professions with no preconceptions at all, changing their orientations toward their local and global environments constantly in response to changing circumstances. For another, even apolitical people have basic understandings about the world around them to help them negotiate their lives; the notion of ideology as worldview thus requires us to assume that every social actor has an ideology, and there are, therefore, potentially billions of different ideologies at any point in time. Thus, most analysts in this tradition refine their definition of ideology to emphasize the relative consistency and formality of ideological as opposed to other kinds of worldviews.22 This is a step forward but still leaves many methodological problems unresolved. Religions, scientific paradigms, and certain kinds of paranoid delusions can be quite internally consistent too, but few people would wish to refer
21. Leon Baradat, Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991); and Arthur T. Denzau and Douglass C. North, Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions, Kyklos 47, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 3-31. 22. Philip Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter, 206-61 (New York: Free Press, 1964); Clifford Geertz, ed., Ideology as a Cultural System, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); John Gerring, Ideology: A Definitional Analysis, Political Research Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1997): 957-94; and Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

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to, say, Sufism, quantum mechanics, or the worldview of mass murderer Gary Ridgway as ideologies. More important, such a definition of ideology demands that the analyst develop testable criteria for distinguishing degrees of consistency in political Weltanschauungensomething rarely attempted in comparative analyses of this sort. The second most common definition of ideology in the social science literature can be traced to the scorn of Napolon Bonaparte for the French ideologues, that is, Enlightenment intellectuals who wished to arrive at a predictive theory that would explain the origins of political beliefs and thus, in principle, allow for a more objective science of human begins. Napolon saw these intellectuals as hopelessly impractical, and his dismissal of the ideologues thus generated the stubborn association of ideology with incorrect and unrealistic thought. In the scholarly literature, this definition of ideology shows up in studies of the ways in which ideological blinders can inhibit perception of reality among closed-minded individuals.23 It also permeates the literature on United States foreign policy, in which the political philosophies of U.S. opponents are frequently described as ideological to distinguish them from the presumably pragmatic views of U.S. allies. Unfortunately, this definition of ideology also gets us into sticky methodological difficulties. Fundamentally, to assess which beliefs of political actors are ideological and which are realistic, the analyst herself must presume to know just what reality is. Otherwise, one persons ideology will be another persons foresighted strategy, and vice versa. The third common definition of ideology is taken primarily from studies of American and West European electoral politics, and this is to equate political ideology with self-placement on a left-right numerical scale. In the delimited context of consolidated Western electoral democracies, studies based on this operational definition can, of course, be extremely useful. On a broader comparative level, however, such a definition begs the question of just why left and right are given their particular political connotations in different social environments. At best, the left-right
23. Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

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scale can measure ideological positions in Western polities since the French Revolution, when the original National Assembly happened to place the Jacobins at the extreme left of the hall and the Legitimists at the extreme right, generating the core associations of left with radicalism and right with conservatism. Even after 1789, however, the precise political content of left and right has demonstrably changed over time and varied from place to place, despite heroic attempts to find some consistent and stable meaning to these terms.24 In post-communist Russia, to take an illustrative case, Boris Yeltsins self-identified Left defeated pro-Gorbachev forces they labeled part of the Right (over Gorbachevs strenuous objections)25; a few years later, supporters of Yeltsins Westernization policies, acknowledging the influence of Margaret Thatcher, called themselves the right, while Zyuganovs proimperial communist party appropriated the term left (albeit, according to Zyuganov, a patriotic left). Public opinion polls taken at the time, not surprisingly, also demonstrate a remarkably wide range of public understandings of the meanings of left and rightat least until the success of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in claiming the term left for itself brought some clarity to the entire Russian political spectrum.26 In this case, we see political ideology generating institutionalized definitions of left and right, rather than conceptions of left and right somehow generating coherent ideological positions. Given the inadequacy of the most common definitions of the term ideology in comparative research (and the conflation of ideology with other ideational variables mentioned above), work on the causal impact of ideology tends to run into some predictable methodological problems. The foremost of these is a tendency through the literature to employ a functionalist approach to explaining the existence of political ideologies, in a form that is theoretically fallacious.27 For Marx and his followers, ideology
24. For examples, see Noberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 25. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996). 26. Timothy Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 27. David Hackett Fischer, Historians Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Gerring, Ideology.

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can be explained by its role in serving the interest of a given economic class, but if so, to argue that ideology has a causal impact in buttressing class domination becomes tautological.28 For Geertz, the existence of ideology can be explained through its role in formalizing cultural norms to cement the legitimacy of political rulers29; again, given this definition, arguments about the role of ideology in building political legitimacy become inevitably circular. Even in much of the recent rational choice literature on ideology, this sort of functionalism ironically rears its ugly head; thus, Denzau and North explain the role of shared mental models by pointing to the reduced transaction costs among adherents of the same ideology but never explain how rational individuals could ever coordinate around a single mental model of reality, given that such shared mental models are public goods for their adherents and no preexisting selective incentives exist to ensure their provision.30 Finally, all of these functionalist approaches to ideology, by their very nature, can tell us nothing about the formation and impact of ideologies that fail to benefit ascendant classes, political elites, or rational economic actors. Yet a methodologically rigorous argument for the impact of ideology on observable political outcomes must avoid selection on the dependent variable, that is, examining only ideologies that win.31 All of these considerations lead me to propose a new definition of ideology that hopefully improves upon these common approaches. Specifically, I define ideology as any formal and consistent definition of the criteria for membership in a real or proposed political community.32 This definition takes its cue from the
28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part I, 2nd ed., in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 146-200 (New York: W W Norton, 1977); and Antonio . . Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 29. Geertz, Ideology as a Cultural System. 30. Denzau and North, Shared Mental Models. 31. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry:Qualitative Inference in Scientific Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 32. Stephen E. Hanson, Ideology, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Anti-system Parties in PostCommunist Russia, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 14, no. 1-2, (March/June 1998): 98-127; Hanson, Defining Democratic Consolidation, in Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, ed. Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip Roeder, 126-51 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Hanson, Instrumental Democracy: The End of Ideology and the Decline of Russian Political Parties, in The Elections of 1999-2000 in Russia: Their Impact and Legacy, ed. Vicki Hesli and William Reisinger, 163-85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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literature on formal and consistent worldviews in the first school of thought examined above and excludes from the concept the fuzzy, inconsistent, and informal norms and practices typical of most ordinary social actors (political and apolitical alike). I go a step further, however, in focusing attention here on how certain formal, consistent political viewpoints also set out clear rules for defining just who is a member of ones political community and who is alien. From this perspective, ideologues are people who explicitly choose to politicize their identities by designing recognizable and enforceable group boundaries that can be policed. It is not surprising, then, that ideologues are frequently interested in claiming control over a statethat is, the monopoly of the legitimate means of coercion within a given territory to institutionalize such identity boundaries.33 Formal and consistent religious worldviews that focus on a world beyond this one, therefore, are not ideologies by this definition, neither are scientific paradigms or personal philosophies/delusions that do not claim to articulate criteria for political membership. Ideologues, by this definition, are actually quite rare; few social actors in any given social context are able to set out clear and consistent definitions for membership in the political community they favor. By this definition, moreover, ideologies are neither incorrect nor correct; ones approbation or condemnation of a given ideology will instead depend upon ones particular values. Finally, the term ideology as defined here is meant to be employed as a Weberian ideal type; no political actor or set of actors is ever absolutely formal and absolutely consistent about criteria for defining political membership, but nonetheless certain political actors orient their behavior toward each other in ways that closely approximate this ideal typical definition. It remains to be shown how this alternative definition of ideology can help us pinpoint the causal mechanism that hypothetically links ideology to successful party building and subsequently to regime consolidation in the sense of predictable support by staff of the formal political norms of the state. In this context, it is
33. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 78 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

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important to note that the definition of ideology as any formal, consistent definition of the criteria for membership in a real or proposed political communitylike the rational choice approach of Denzau and Northrests on a foundation of methodological individualism. Ideologies do not represent or reflect preexisting social groups or structures; they are instead proposed by specific individuals and either accepted or rejected by other individuals who are in a position to consider new ideological definitions of their polity. Adopting a methodologically individualist approach to ideology allows us to explore not only how ideologies exert their effects on social actors but also how social actors create new ideologies in the first place. Specifically, I argue that ideologies can succeed in generating collective action in favor of new political identities to the extent that they artificially elongate the time horizons of new ideological converts. New ideologies, as formal and consistent definitions of proposed future polities, can give those who accept them confidence that they have found a dependable, long-term group of trustworthy allies. As we know from a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies, lower discount rates among social actors can generate more successful cooperation over time than is typical of actors who discount future benefits more heavily.34 Moreover, the very formality and consistency of ideological approach to defining political membership ensures a certain credible commitment among the faithful.35 Since it is often very costly to maintain a formal consistency concerning ones political identityparticularly in times of rapid social and political changeactors who manage to do so over long periods of time are unlikely to be behaving opportunistically. Of course, in stable institutional environments, the causal effects of ideological commitment and of simple instrumental rationality can be very hard to disentangle; adherence to hegemonic definitions of political identity in such cases is generally both a sound strategy and, for
34. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 35. Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England, Journal of Economic History, 49, no. 4 (December 1989): 803-32.

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many, something valued in and of itself. In environments of high social uncertainty, however, ideologues proposing new definitions of political membership can sometimes convince even instrumentally rational actors to gamble on their new ideological vision of the political future, making collective action among ideological activists more durable and powerful than that attained by pragmatic political parties. Party formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and post-Soviet Russia To test the above hypothesis, we need to find social environments of extremely high uncertainty where instrumentally rational actors are likely to have very high discount rates, to discover whether ideological actors with artificially long time horizons will in fact be more successful in organizing collective action. In addition, to observe the evolution and competition of ideological and pragmatic parties over time, we need to find cases in which formal democratic rules of contestation remain in place for a sufficiently long period of time to rule out alternative explanations for political outcomes; thus, suggestive cases such as the victory of the Bolshevik party in 1917 or the Kemalists in postwar Turkey might appear to confirm this theory, but the reestablishment of one party rule around a particular formal, consistent vision of the future polity in both cases occurred too quickly to show that pragmatic party-building efforts might not have been equally successful. The three cases of postimperial democracy under examination here are ideal for the scientific purpose of testing the hypothesis that the ideological party builders will outperform pragmatic ones in conditions of high social uncertainty. If this hypothesis is correct, we would expect in all three casesdespite their many differencesto find that would-be party builders with formal and consistent definitions of the future of France, Germany, and Russia will be the most successful in organizing political activists to overcome the collective action problems involved in nationwide party building, even if these individuals initially emerge from relatively marginal social backgrounds. Similarly, we would expect to find that relatively pragmatic political entrepreneurs in such situations of high uncertainty 360 Postimperial Democracies

will be forced to change their political positions so frequently that they will lose the credibility necessary to inspire the commitment of new party activists; hence, even party-building efforts relying on initially powerful social support will run aground as individual free riding and defection become more frequent. Finally, we would expect that the prospects for eventual regime consolidation, whether democratic or autocratic, depend upon the degree to which successful ideological parties are capable of imposing their new definitions of the polity in the reorganization of key state bureaucracies. In all three of these cases, these hypotheses are borne out (see Table 1). Chaos In early Third Republic France, early Weimar Germany, and early post-Soviet Russia alike, the first few years after imperial collapse can be justifiably described as chaotic, generating situations of political, economic, and cultural uncertainty that radically shortened the time horizons of ordinary citizens. France after Louis Napolons defeat at Sedan in 1870 was plunged into one crisis after anotherincluding the last-ditch efforts of the Government of National Defense to hold off the Prussian advance, the painful occupation regime set up by the Prussians after the final French defeat (including the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine and a bill for war reparations totaling five billion francs), the formation of the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression in spring 1871, severe economic crisis, and, through 1873, when the last Prussian troops left French territory, heated battles over the ultimate constitutional form of the French state.36 Weimar Germany after the defeat of the Reich in 1918 got off to a similarly turbulent start, beginning with the revolution of 1918 itself. The 1919 Versailles Treaty led to the deindustrialization and occupation of the Ruhr by the French, war reparations even more severe than those levied by the Prussians in 1870, and
36. Allan Mitchell, The German Influence in France after 1870: The Formation of the French Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Reberioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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Table 1.

Stages of Development in Uncertain Democracies

Chaos Third Republic Weimar Germany Post-Soviet Russia 1870-73 1918-23 1990-93

Stalemate 1874-76 1924-28 1994-98

Crisis/Resolution 1877-85 1929-33 1999-2005

a war guilt clause holding Germany solely responsible for the outbreak of World War I. The following years saw well-organized bids for power by both right-wing paramilitary groupings and radical communists, serious concerns about political separatism in Bavaria, and hyperinflation that had rendered the deutschmark essentially worthless by 1923.37 Finally, after the Russian Federation declared its sovereignty vis--vis the USSR in 1990, Russians lived through the unexpected total collapse of the Soviet Union, severe inflation that destroyed most peoples life savings, secessionist movements in several ethnic regions of Russia, and a prolonged battle for political supremacy between President Yeltsin and the Congress of Peoples Deputies that culminated in the bloody suppression of the latter by the former in October 1993.38 In sum, in all three postimperial democracies, rational actors should have hadand largely did havevery short time horizons, given the seemingly unpredictable nature of political, economic, international, and cultural change. As predicted, too, in all three cases, initially marginal political ideologues emerged out of the period of chaos to lead the most successful party organizations in their respective polities, outcompeting initially powerful centrist parties that initially seemed far more likely to triumph. In the early Third Republic, judging simply by the existing power resources at the time of imperial collapse, one would have expected to see the continuing political dominance of the Orlanist party led by Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, and the Bonapartists led first by
37. Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); and Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 38. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russias Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001).

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Louis Napolon in exile and then, after his death, by the Prince Imperial. The Orlanists had most of the French bourgeoisie on their side, and in 1871, Thiers was perhaps the best-known politician in the country.39 The Bonapartists were temporarily in disarray due to the collapse of the empire at Sedan but nonetheless continued to have substantial support within the state bureaucracy and the military.40 Yet during this period, neither of these parties could settle upon clear ideological messages depicting a consistent, explicit definition of the future of France. By the latter half of the 1870s, both the Orlanists and the Bonapartists had suffered innumerable factional splits, and by 1877, neither was very influential in the National Assembly. Instead, the dominant cleavage in second half of the 1870s was between legitimists whose leader, the Comte de Chambord, continued to insist on a return to feudal rights, the fleur-de-lys, and French defense of the temporal power of the Papacyand the republicans, led by the well-known radical Lon Gambetta, a hero of the French resistance to the Prussians who was ideologically committed to universal male suffrage and secular public education.41 In Weimar Germany, too, centrist parties could not manage to maintain party discipline in the early period of chaos; both the left liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei and the right liberal Deutsche Volkspartei quickly lost support to more radical left and right parties, while the Social Democratic party lost ground to both independent workers parties and to the pro-Soviet Communist Party.42 Here, too, one of the main reasons for the decline of the center of the party spectrum was the inability of Weimars prodemocratic parties to define any clear or consistent conception of prodemocratic German patriotism in the wake of the humiliation imposed on the country by democratic occupying powers. As in the case of Third Republic France, the clear
39. J. P T. Bury and R. P Tombs, Thiers, 1797-1877: A Political Life (London: Allen and Unwin, . . 1986). 40. John Rothney, Bonapartism after Sedan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). 41. J. P T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic (London: Longman, 1973); . and Stephen D. Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852-1883 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 42. Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

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winners in party competition by the mid-1920s were parties with clear and consistent ideologies. Within the Weimar coalition, the Social Democrats rejected the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein and adopted a relatively orthodox Marxist position based on the centrism of Karl Kautsky, while the Catholic Center became increasingly reactionary and statist as well.43 And antisystem parties of the left and right, such as the German National Peoples Party (Deutsch-Nationale Volkspartei), the pro-Soviet Communist Party (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands), and, after 1929, the Nazi Party, proved far more capable of welding together national networks of committed party activists.44 Finally, in post-Soviet Russia as well, efforts at centrism such as the Civic Union formed by Aleksandr Rutskoi and Arkady Volsky found themselves increasingly unable to stem the increasing polarization of the political spectrum; even after October 1993, efforts to weld together parties of power interested primarily in serving Kremlin interests tended to disintegrate due to free riding and short-term switching of party affiliations in response to changing political circumstances.45 Even the relatively ideologically consistent Russias Choice party of Yegor Gaidar suffered greatly from its efforts to be pragmatic in its relationship to power, as former pro-Yeltsin activists split from the party due to its close association with the Kremlin.46 From the first elections to the new State Duma in December 1993 until the last elections of the Yeltsin era in December 1999, only parties with clear, consistent definitions of the future of Russia were able to maintain enough institutional continuity to be reelected in each parliament: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russiawhich did present a consistent superimperial vision of the future Russian state, despite the
43. Berman, Social Democratic Moment; Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Ellen Lovell Evans, The German Center Party, 1870-1933: A Study in Political Catholicism, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981). 44. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 45. Hanson, Ideology. 46. Michael McFaul, Russias Choice: The Perils of Revolutionary Democracy, in Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Elections of 1993, ed. Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough, 115-39 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998).

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unpredictable antics and dubious financial dealings of its leader Zhirinovskyand the liberal Yabloko (Apple) Party. Stalemate In all three postimperial democracies, the rise of ideological parties and the decline of pragmatic ones gave rise to a period of stalemate in which competing ideological visions of the future polity struggled for power against a president with no official party affiliation of his own. In the French case, conservatives and monarchists within the National Assembly forced Thiers to resign in 1873, and his successor as president, General MacMahon, was a military hero with no ideology of his own but a cultural affinity for ultramontane and monarchical groupings.47 Although the various factions in the Assembly were able to negotiate a new constitution in 1875 that formally declared France to be a republic, powerful conservative political and social forces continued to resist what they saw as the anarchism, secularism, and even socialist tendencies of the Republican Party leadership.48 Ultimately, disputes over the power of the church in education played a major role in generating a political crisis in which President MacMahon tried to dissolve the National Assembly and sought support for this move in a national plebiscite. The Republican Party, however, was by this point organized enough on a national scale to mobilize activists throughout the country to rally voters in defense of republicanism and against what they depicted as antidemocratic feudal reactionaries bent on restoring their former privileges, and MacMahon suffered a politically fatal defeat.49 In Germany, too, the relative stabilization of the polity and economy after the initial chaos period in 1924 did not end the struggle to define the future symbols and orientation of the postimperial state. Indeed, after the election of the aging war hero President Hindenburg in 1925, the Reichstag became increasingly polarized along the lines of its major ideological partiesthe Catholic
47. Mitchell, German Influence in France. 48. Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society. 49. Judith Stone, Sons of the Revolution: Radical Democrats in France, 1862-1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

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Center, the Social Democrats, the nationalist right, and the Communist left. The Great Depression thus only exacerbated the general erosion of democratic compromise and bargaining in the Weimar Republic.50 After 1930, when Hindenburg and Brning began to rely on emergency decrees for most major policy decisionsbypassing parliament altogetherWeimar democracy became an empty shell. In post-Soviet Russia, too, the end of the chaos period in 1993 gave rise to formal political and economic stabilization combined with a continuing stalemate concerning the future ideology of the regime. President Yeltsin, like MacMahon and Hindenburg before him, was increasingly perceived as out of touch, ineffective, and (like Hindenburg) possibly senile. Within the State Duma, the best organized ideological party of the Russian FederationZyuganovs Communistscontinued to insist rhetorically on a clear and consistent definition of Russia as a great power including all the former Soviet republics and clung to cherished ideological symbols such as the hammer and sickle and Lenins mausoleum.51 Zyuganovs ideological rigidity was clear in the 1996 presidential campaign, when he insisted on praising Stalin, sponsoring a Duma declaration that the 1991 accords formally dissolving the USSR were legally invalid, and hinting that a Jewish conspiracy was to blame for all Russias post-communist woes. Even after Zyuganovs defeat to Yeltsin in the 1996 elections, his rhetoric changed very little over the next several years; thus, the sense of stalemate between a weak Kremlin and an antisystem Duma continued to bedevil the fragile postSoviet Russian democracy. Resolution Finally, in each country, a fundamental crisis in the polity led to a resolution in which either an ideological party was able to remake the state in its imageor, if no ideological party succeeded, parties in general were subordinated to an authoritarian state
50. Harold James, Economic Reasons for the Collapse of the Weimar Republic, in Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail?, ed. Ian Kershaw, 30-57 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). 51. Veljko Vujacic, Gennadiy Zyuganov and the Third Road, Post-Soviet Affairs 12, no. 2 (April-June 1996): 118-54.

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bureaucracy. In Third Republic France, the victory of Gambetta and the Republicans over President MacMahon in the seize Mai crisis of 1877 clarified for all relevant political actors that the role of the parliament would henceforth be paramount; from this point on, the Third Republic presidency became a weak, largely ceremonial office. Moreover, the Republican leadership took advantage of its strong and loyal network of party activists to carry out thorough purges of the state, educational, and military apparatuses. Supporters of monarchy, Bonapartism, and the Church were replaced with loyal republicans committed to universal suffrage and free secular education. The Third Republic now officially adopted the Marseillaise as its national anthem and the tricolor flag as its emblem, and declared 14 July a national holiday.52 By the 1880s, the ideological redefinition of France as a republic became culturally accepted, such that even a serious economic downturn and the rise of new antidemocratic challenges to the regime failed to uproot French democracy. Indeed, not only did the Third Republic, despite many serious crises, survive another seven decades, but also the redefinition of France itself consolidated by the victorious republicans remains the central basis of French national identity through the present day.53 The outcome of ideological competition in Weimar Germany, of course, is tragic and well known. Whereas MacMahon allied with the ideologically committed legitimist movement and lost to the prodemocratic Republicans, Hindenburg chose to ally with an ideologically committed National Socialist party that, when given the opportunity, quickly subjugated all its competitors. The ideologically inflexible Catholic Center and orthodox Social Democrats proved incapable of forming a nationwide prodemocracy alliance comparable to that of the French Republicans; instead, Hitlers theory of race war and vision of Germany as the thousand-year Reich provided the ideological basis for the construction of an entirely new type of German state.54 As in the case of France in the 1880s, but this time guided by a profoundly
52. Stone, Sons of the Revolution. 53. Francois Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 (Oxford, UK: Longman, 1992). 54. Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitlers World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

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antiliberal ideology, the victorious political party consolidated its rule by purging political opponents and subordinating the state bureaucracy, military, and educational system. New national symbols such as the swastika and Nazi salute were imposed and enforced, and the German political system was reoriented toward Hitlers leader principle.55 Ultimately, Nazi ideology led to world war and genocide. In the case of Russia, by contrast, the stalemate period ended not with the victory of one or another ideological party but instead with the victory of the president himself. The crisis began with the collapse of the ruble in August 1998. The temporary democratic compromise leading to Yevgeny Primakovs confirmation as prime minister quickly disintegrated again into renewed ideological struggle, with the Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii (KPRF) moving to impeach Yeltsin largely on the grounds of his violations of the Sovietnot the 1993constitution. The defeat of this initiative in spring 1999 gravely weakened Zyuganovs credibility; at the same time, Russias awful economic performance during the 1990s had undermined the power of liberal ideology as well. Thus, when Yeltsin unexpectedly named Vladimir Putin as his successor in August 1999, Russian political parties in general were too weak to succeed in the ensuing battle to consolidate Russias post-Soviet political identity. Instead, Primakov and his ally Yuri Luzhkov worked to weld together one party of power, FatherlandAll Russia, while Putin and his allies cobbled together another party of power, Unity. Putins increasing popularity in the terrifying environment of renewed war in Chechnya and unexplained terrorist bombings throughout Russian territory bolstered Unitys performance in the December 1999 electionsand soon thereafter, like the previous parties of power in the Yeltsin era, FatherlandAll Russia disintegrated. By the time of Putins easy election to the presidency in March 2000, no ideologically coherent party could form a viable opposition to the Kremlin. Nor did Putin himself show any interest whatsoever in articulating a clear and consistent definition of Russia, preferring instead explicitly to reject all formal ideologies and to appeal to a pragmatic
55. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W W Norton, 1999). . .

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patriotism. Whereas France in the resolution phase adopted republican national symbols and Nazi Germany in the resolution phase adopted Nazi national symbols, post-communist Russia under Putin adopted a pragmatic symbolic compromise: the old Soviet national anthem was restored with new, non-communist lyrics, and the red flag (minus its hammer and sickle) was restored as the flag of the Russian military while the democratic tricolor remained the flag of the state. With Putins triumph, and the end of ideology in the Russian Federation, the Russian party system began to disintegrate entirely.56 Instrumental deputies throughout the parliament quickly signed on to support Putins cause, as did the equally instrumental governors of most of Russias 89 subjects of the federation. By December 2003, the poor showing of the KPRF and the utter collapse of both Yabloko and the liberal Union of Right Forces concretized Putins total dominance over the Russian political system. As before, the only organized opposition parties in the Russian Duma were those with clear and consistent formal ideologiesnamely, the LDRP and the KPRFbut both had been so completely discredited by their records of compromise with the Kremlin that neither had many loyal activists willing to sacrifice for the cause. Meanwhile, the United Russia party controlled a twothirds majority in the Duma, ensuring passage of any legislation favored by Putin. However, while as of 2004 it appeared that Russian democracy had essentially failed and a new form of plebiscitarian authoritarian rule had been established, Russia was still a long way from anything like Hitlers ideologically committed fascism. The formal constitutional order established in 1993 remained largely in place, for the time being, and Putin continued to pledge that he would uphold not only the constitution but also Russias multiparty democracy as his second term unfolded. Without any clear or consistent ideology to guide it, Putins presidential regime appeared unlikely to weld together antiliberal activists to build a strong authoritarianism although informally, antiliberal actors had plenty of scope to harass, marginalize, and even imprison their political opponents. Still, the
56. Hanson, Instrumental Democracy.

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consolidation of pragmatic patriotism in Russia under Putin left fundamental questions about Russias national identity unresolved with potentially destabilizing effects in the future. Conclusion In all three of our cases of postimperial democracy, ideological parties tended to defeat pragmatic parties in the initial period of postimperial chaos, ideological parties tended to generate a political stalemate both between the executive and legislative branch and among competing ideological parties, and a final resolution of the political struggle led to regime consolidation along the lines of the most successful ideology (whether prodemocratic or antidemocratic). The case of Russia under Putin, then, is the proverbial exception that proves the rule: no ideology, no parties. Given that our case selection controls for the most widely cited institutional, historical, and cultural factors inhibiting or facilitating democratization, this study provides compelling support for the argument that ideology plays a crucial, and hitherto misunderstood, role in determining the fate of uncertain democracies. Is the case proven beyond any doubt? Obviously, no comparative historical analysis can control perfectly for every variable, and some readers may quickly think of innumerable differences among nineteenth-century France, early twentieth-century Germany, and post-communist Russia that have not been addressed here. To counter the argument for the causal role of ideology, however, it is not enough merely to point out that every case is unique: rather, one must make a plausible case that some other variable accounts better for the divergent regime outcomes in these three cases. Others may object that the argument here places too much emphasis on agencyin particular, the political rhetoric of marginal ideologuesand too little on socioeconomic structure. Are outcomes so completely determined by the long-term goals of radical visionaries as the argument here implies? To begin with, it should be reemphasized that the dynamics explored in this essay are not typical of stable political environments; the role of ideology stands out here precisely because intense levels of social uncertainty temporarily weakened the constraining power of class 370 Postimperial Democracies

power and inherited institutions. Moreover, it is certainly true that the resolution of the crises in these three postimperial democracies depended to a large extent on the decision by nonideological political and economic elites to back one or another political partyor to crush all partiesat the end of the stalemate period. Specifically, the decision of the French bourgeoisie to side with Gambetta over MacMahon and of the German bourgeoisie to side with Hitler over the social democrats played crucial roles in pushing France toward democracy and Germany toward fascism, respectively. Moreover, the fact that the post-Soviet Russian bourgeoisie remained too weak to put up any serious resistance to the initiatives of President Putin in his first term also contributed mightily to the establishment of weak state authoritarianism in Russia. Nevertheless, in none of these three cases did the most powerful class or institutional actors in the initial period of imperial breakdown work consistently to promote the particular regimes that were ultimately established. Quite the contrary: the French bourgeoisie chose to back the radical republicans only because the legitimists were seen as even worse threats to property rights, and most German capitalists embraced Hitler only when it seemed to them that the Nazis were the only sure defense against socialism. In analyzing regime change in these revolutionary periods, the role of structural conditions certainly cannot be ignoredbut socioeconomic structures could select for only those political forces that had managed to survive and reproduce themselves in the initial chaos period. As we have seen, in each case, radical ideologues were the only actors capable of managing this feat under conditions of high social uncertainty. If the argument in this essay is right, then the presence of committed ideologues in post-Soviet Russia might also have made a crucial difference to the regime outcome therefor good or for ill. A more consistent and coherent ideological articulation of Russia as a democratic community in the early 1990s might have given liberal parties a fighting chance to organize Russian activists and voters to resist the establishment of presidential semidictatorship in the early twenty-first century. Conversely, a more consistent and coherent articulation of Russian fascism could have led to the establishment of an aggressively nationalist Russian East European Politics and Societies 371

state, generating Yugoslav-style ethnic violence throughout the former Soviet Union. The victory of the nonideological Putin, however, leaves the long-term trajectory of Russian politics very much undecided, as it will be extremely difficult to consolidate any coherent Russian state institutions on the basis of Putins contradictory hodgepodge of symbols and political commitments. Given a new political crisis, the weakness of Russian institutions might allow ideological agency once again to play a determining causal role.

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