The 1990s saw democratic transitions in Russia and Indonesia, the largest post-Soviet and Muslim nations in the world, respectively. By 2009, however, Vladimir Putin had reconsolidated autocracy in the former, while the latter had undergone three post-transition elections and looked to be a consolidated democracy. Why did these two polities diverge so substantially? What was the role of ordinary people in such processes? These are the central questions motivating Danielle Lussier’s Constraining Elites in Russia and Indonesia. Taking a behavioral approach, Lussier explores these questions through the lens of individual citizens in each country, both by analyzing multiple waves of survey data and by interviewing smaller numbers of people. She finds the answer to why Indonesia’s democracy succeeded in elite-constraining forms of political participation; conversely, the explanation for Russia’s democratic erosion is to be found in elite-enabling forms of participation. The causal framework is presented early on (p. 19) and drives the empirical work and explanatory claims that follow.
Belying the heavy focus on individual-level attitudinal and behavioral data is the macro-comparative framework of the Russia—Indonesia research design. Lussier suggests that as two large oil-rich countries with predominantly authoritarian (more specifically, “mobilizing regime”) pasts, both nations share much in common. However, she argues, we should have expected Russia to fare better because of its higher level of development and longer history of statehood. On balance, then, the outcome is puzzling. To explain this puzzle, she turns to a sequential set of empirical chapters that employ analysis of survey data and a set of interviews from both countries to argue that Indonesians are (a) more likely to engage in elite-constraining behavior, (b) more likely to feel politically efficacious, and (c) more trusting in elections and institutions than their Russian counterparts. Building on these findings, and on the logic of the causal model presented in the first chapter, Lussier suggests that Indonesia’s democracy has succeeded because ordinary Indonesians engaged in enough elite-constraining behavior to make it so.
There is much to applaud in this book. First, it is not common to see either of these large and important countries analyzed in a systematic comparative framework, which is unfortunate. Lussier helps fill this gap in the literature. Given the fraught nature of both postcommunism and Islam in the academic study of democratization, such an intervention is overdue for this reason as well. Second, Lussier’s effort to bridge the fields of political behavior (still predominant in advanced democracies) and transitology is innovative and ambitious, and we should want to see many more such studies taking seriously the views and actions of individual citizens in fragile new democracies. What there is to question, as a result, should not detract from the fact that this is a splendid book.
There are, in fact, some fair places to question the book’s setup and conclusions. First, the macro research design could reasonably be interrogated. It is true that Russia was more developed than Indonesia at the time of transition, and it is true that both are resource-rich countries. And it is true that both had a long autocratic past. What is more questionable is Lussier’s assertion that these were both mobilizing regimes cut from largely the same cloth (pp. 80–81). My sense is that it would be more feasible to observe that the Soviet Union, with Russia at its core, was the most socially intrusive and coercively mobilizing regime of the twentieth century. Indonesia in the New Order era was simply never anywhere near this invasive and put much more of a premium on acquiescence between elections than active pro-regime mobilization. Hence, the “floating mass” principle driving New Order politics under which citizens were expected simply not to participate. As a result, as multiple authors have noted (e.g., Michael Bernhard and Ekrem Karakoc, “Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship,” World Politics, 59(4), 2007; Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker, Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes, 2017), citizens of the former Soviet Union are substantially less likely to belong to civic associations and to trust political institutions. In short, one could argue that divergent levels of participation are learned from the long-term macropolitical setting, and are endogenous to regime attributes rather than productive of them. Lussier herself hints at this being an important difference later in the book (p. 174), and it is a potentially central alternative argument.
Another important factor missing from the Indonesia analysis is the fundamental economic transformation of the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s was followed by a surprisingly quick and successful shift to light-manufacturing export-oriented economics, and this almost certainly had a real impact on the economic autonomy of ordinary citizens from the state (and its many inefficient state-owned enterprises). No such shift had ever taken place in the Soviet era, leaving post-Soviet Russians in the early 1990s with nothing of the newfound economic independence that many of their Indonesian counterparts would have eight years later. One might ask, too, about the crushing economic meltdowns that both countries suffered in the 1990s. These were both Depression-level crises. There was one key difference. In Russia, democratic leaders presided over the crisis, arguably delegitimating Boris Yeltsin and democratic governance more broadly. In Indonesia, it was autocratic rulers who had to confront the one thing that could threaten their legitimacy: failure to provide the development on which they had built their reason for existence.
Insufficient attention is given here, too, to the legacy of both official opposition parties and nonparty Islamic organizations in the New Order era. The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI and its later offshoot PDI-P or the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) and the United Development Party (PPP), while they never posed a national-level threat to Suharto’s ruling GOLKAR party apparatus, regularly performed well at the provincial level in different parts of the country, and activists took their presence seriously enough to keep the parties viable straight into the post-transition years. So, too, did the two major Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, remain active and important parts of the political landscape before democratization. These latter two bodies, in particular, were effective in part because they eschewed direct electoral roles, focusing instead on public goods provision and education. The result was that by 1999, Indonesian democracy could inherit a set of robust organizations to be complemented, rather than having to build a civil society and party apparatus entirely from scratch. Moreover, these organizations had not been tainted by direct association with autocratic rule (although even GOLKAR has fared well under democracy). The important point, again, is not that Lussier’s rich analysis of divergent attitudinal and participatory rates is incorrect, simply that it misses some important parts of a feasible alternative causal account linking prior conditions to regime outcomes through behavior.
A final point to consider is whether elites might not be a more central part of the story in both cases. One could quite reasonably argue that had not the leaderships of both Suharto’s ruling party and his armed forces withdrawn their support at a crucial moment in May 1998, his regime might well have survived despite the massive anti-regime protests going on. No such set of elites could pose a threat like this to Vladimir Putin. As a result, it is worth asking again how the analysis might differ with a closer look at elite dynamics.
Despite the questions raised by employing these more traditional lenses in the study of regimes and regime change, Constraining Elites in Russia and Indonesia is an important addition to the study of political behavior in new democracies. Lussier’s welcome and skillful effort to tease out the role of individuals in holding elites to account and pushing democracy forward at the ground level should be followed by more of this kind of work, especially that which ties attitudes and behavior directly to their macro contexts.
