While the Nordic democracies used to lead the world in the proportion of women in parliament, the list is now headed by authoritarian Rwanda (with almost two-thirds as of 2015), with the top-twenty including authoritarian Cuba and Angola as well as the hybrid regimes of Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Mozambique.Footnote 1 Even Arab authoritarian regimes, long the laggards in women’s representation, have made progress over the last decade; Algeria and Sudan jumped from single digits to almost one-third and Saudi Arabia from zero to one-fifth. While women’s legislative participation has doubled worldwide over the last half century, so that about one out of every five national legislators are now women, recent cross-national quantitative analysis suggests a U-shaped curve in which there are higher proportions of women in democracies and authoritarian regimes (with the lowest proportions in semi-democracies).Footnote 2 Similarly, the number of women heading political systems swelled from none to twenty, representing one out of ten United Nations members, but women leaders have been less likely in democracies.Footnote 3
Putin’s Russia, like some other authoritarian-leaning regimes, has been actively recruiting women into politics, with increasing numbers of women in the two legislative houses, a woman head of the upper house, and prominent women in the executive branch, including the head of Russia’s central bank. However, this influx has not led to real political advancement for these women or to the broader representation of women’s interests. As was obvious to the world in the harsh prosecution of Pussy Riot in 2012—with feminism itself on trial during the court proceedingsFootnote 4—there seems to be less, not more gender equality. Other authoritarian-leaning regimes appear to have similar problems. For example, in Uganda, where the parliament is more than one-third women, Aili Mari Tripp found the 1989 introduction of reserved seats for women came at the same time as party competition was suspended, and once in office, the women were beholden to male politicians.Footnote 5 Why aren’t these increased numbers of women in authoritarian-leaning regimes making inroads in gender equality, but instead apparently contributing to retrenchment on gender equality and democracy?
For those who observe regimes like Russia, the retrenchment is not surprising, but the combination of recruiting women into politics without the expected policy and political results is a central question for both theoretical and empirical feminist political science.Footnote 6 It is usually framed through Hanna Pitkin’s concepts, observing increases in women’s descriptive representation (“where the representative stands for a group by virtue of sharing similar characteristics such as race, sex, ethnicity, or residence”) without the expected changes in substantive representation, (“where the representative seeks to advance a group’s policy preferences and interests”).Footnote 7 As Sarah Childs and Joni Lovenduski summarize, the relationship between descriptive representation and substantive representation remains “opaque,” as “much of the process of representing an interest in our elected political institutions and other institutions may be hidden from view, a matter of behind-the-scenes organizing and influence.”Footnote 8 The literature on women’s representation focuses mostly on democratic-leaning regimes, but this relationship is even more obscured in authoritarian-leaning regimes, with their more limited transparency.
This puzzle also has implications also for activism and policymaking. Since the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women, a variety of actors have advocated increasing the number of women in politics as a strategy to address all sorts of global problems, including corruption and extremism, that often go along with authoritarianism.Footnote 9 But while advocacy groups play this numbers game, it has become clear that there is no “critical mass” after which women are able to easily advocate for women’s interests (itself a problematic issue, but not the focus here).Footnote 10 The study of party and legislative quotas for women—which over half of all countries in the world have adopted—has become the dominant approach to questions of women’s representation.Footnote 11 Yet a satisfactory answer to this puzzle of descriptive without substantive representation has yet to be provided.
To build a new theory, I use the Russian case since Vladimir Putin ascended to power at the turn of the millennium. In order to focus on gendered regime dynamics, I sidestep the debate over Russia’s regime type—e.g., whether hybrid, competitive authoritarian, or authoritarian—but, as with most scholars of Russia, embrace informal politics as a critical element of understanding the reality of political outcomes.Footnote 12 As typical of those who investigate elites in Russia, I have had to rely mostly on accounts by Russian journalists,Footnote 13 but I also use participant observation at political events, interviews with Moscow-based insiders and activists in 2013, and a handful of double-blind interviews, in which recent émigré research assistants confidentially interview contacts back home.
I argue here that this twenty-first century puzzle should be understood as a bait and switch. On the one hand, authoritarian-leaning regimes, much like democratic regimes, have begun to “fast-track” some elite women. Fast-tracking is a concept developed by Drude Dahlerup to summarize the formal (quota) policies used to promote women into electoral politics in the last couple of decades, as opposed to in the “old democracies,” such as the Nordic countries, where women tended to advance through conventional elite recruitment mechanisms similar to men.Footnote 14 As the Russian case makes clear, informal politics can also fast-track women into formal posts and institutions. On the other hand, the informal politics that fast-track these women leave them “boxed in,” that is, constrained by gendered, informal rules and institutions that limit their advancement and their ability to advocate for women’s interests, often contributing to democratic retrenchment.
In the following, I first show that there has been an increase in women’s descriptive representation in Russia since 2000 without an increase in women’s substantive representation. Second, I outline the current state of the field of gender politics in Putin’s Russia, very little of which addresses this puzzle. Third, I develop the new framework of the boxing in of fast-tracked women, and fourth, I illustrate and elaborate this framework in the study of five key arenas of Russian politics. Fifth, I provide evidence that these boxed-in women have not been able to substantively represent women. In the conclusion, I suggest how this new framework can push social scientists to explore the nexus of gender and informal politics more seriously. Before policymakers and activists decide that advocating for women’s participation in politics is no longer worthwhile, I show how political scientists can map the dynamics of informal rules and elite networks in ways that can lead to more effective advocacy.
Increased Descriptive, not Substantive, Representation
While excluded from the top two formal posts in the regime, the president and prime minister, women in Putin’s Russia have been promoted into other national executive posts, national legislative posts, and governorships. The proportion of women in the formal legislatures has, in general, increased since 2000, reaching the highest proportions in Russian history with 14 percent participation in the Duma in 2007 and 17 percent in the Federation Council in 2014 (refer to table 1).Footnote 15 The Federation Council especially seems to have experienced an influx, with the percent of women more than tripling in four years and Valentina Matvienko brought in to chair in 2011. There was also the historic presence of three women in Putin’s cabinet during the tandem rule with Dmitry Medvedev (2008–2012).Footnote 16 After Putin and Medvedev swapped positions in 2012, Medvedev’s cabinet had two women, one as deputy prime minister, and Putin brought three women into his presidential administration, appointing Elvira Nabiullina, his former economic minister, to head Russia’s central bank, a first for the major economic powers. Other prominent women in the executive include Tatiana Golikova (chair of the Accounts Chamber) and Olga Golodets (vice prime minister). Women have also been brought in as governors, with Matvienko governing Saint Petersburg (2003–2011), Natalia Komarova governing the key oil-producing region of Khanty–Mansi (beginning in 2010), Marina Kovtun governing the strategically important region of Murmansk (beginning in 2012), and Svetlana Orlova governing the Vladimir oblast, a region just east of Moscow (beginning in 2013).
Table 1 Percent women in formal legislatures
Source: Interparliamentary Union 2015
Women’s participation in the upper-echelon of power in Putin’s Russia is more extensive than during the early Soviet period (when Soviet feminists had some sway), with Matvienko’s new role as the highest formal post of any woman since Catherine the Great.Footnote 17 While the percent of women was greater in Soviet legislative bodies (with an informal quota of one-third), these bodies had little real power. By 1990, the quota had been effectively eliminated, and during the Yeltsin years, “politics . . . [was] seen as a dirty business made for men” across all political arenas.Footnote 18 From a beginning in the early 2000s, the increases in women in politics picked up pace around the 2007 Duma elections. Within a few months, all major parties had increased the proportion of women on their lists. In the 2011 elections, almost one out of five of the list of the party of power (United Russia) were women, the highest proportion of women in all represented parties.Footnote 19 Several parties had also created women’s sections, including United Russia which incorporated the Women of Russia political faction.Footnote 20
As Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon summarize, the convention for assessing the impact on women’s substantive representation is to use gender-related policies, “measures through which governments can accelerate progress toward” the ideal of gender equality, a situation in which “all women and men have similar opportunities to participate in politics, the economy, and society; their roles are equally valued; neither suffers from gender-based disadvantage; and both are considered free and autonomous beings with dignity and rights.”Footnote 21 These include such policies as constitutional equality, prohibitions on violence against women, abortion/contraception legality and funding, parental leave, funding for childcare, and laws on workplace equality.
Using this convention, Russia’s results are paltry. Since Putin came to power, there are few, if any, national policies that aim to improve gender equality and several that lessen women’s status. Most significantly, Russia has not passed even the weak gender equality or domestic violence legislation that have been under consideration for more than a decade, types of legislation which virtually all other post-communist countries have passed.Footnote 22 The former, as a response to the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women, would ban gender discrimination in the workplace, establish a process through which workers could appeal to the courts, and collect systematic evidence of gender disparities. Proposed first in the 1990s, proponents tried to re-introduce gender equality legislation in 2012, only to be met with intense resistance from the Russian Orthodox Church, which claimed that such legislation would undermine the family. A 2013 attempt to bring new domestic violence legislation—based on international standards—met a similar fate, even though Putin allegedly gave the nod.
The most prominent gender-related program of the Putin era is the so-called “maternity capital,” created in 2006, which provides women a lump sum (roughly $10,000) to be used for education, housing, or retirement when they had a second or subsequent child.Footnote 23 This policy has been accompanied by an array of other policies: increases in support for pre-natal care, child allowances, parental leaves, homecare, and daycare. But, as Andrea Chandler points out, these policies were not designed to promote gender equality, but to address Russia’s looming demographic crisis.Footnote 24 This assertion is backed by the fact that most subsidies increase based on the number of children parents have, and that these pronatalist policies have been accompanied by increasing restrictions on women’s access to abortion. In general, though much of the language of formal law is now gender neutral, Russia’s legislation does not challenge the prevailing assumptions about the family as the reproductive unit of the society, with women as the primary parents.Footnote 25
Women’s and feminist activists claim some small victories. Following a decade of NGO-based activism, some municipalities began to offer counseling and temporary shelter for victims of domestic violence within broader family social-service centers.Footnote 26 Feminist activists claim credit for 2011 abortion legislation being less restrictive than first proposed.Footnote 27 Two leading women’s rights organizations worked tirelessly for a 2011 maternity-leave reform that made it easier for women to be compensated if fired while pregnant. The first draft of the Concept of Russian State Family Policy called for decreasing divorce and abortion and for recognizing church marriages; however, the final edict in 2014 had no strictures on religious adherence in the family and no longer blamed Russian families’ failure to rely on what were construed as traditional religious values.Footnote 28 The final Concept even mentions domestic violence as an important problem facing families in Russia, and Putin has made some promises in the last few years to help families balance work and family.
Still, most of these small victories could be just as easily attributed to the fact that Russian society as a whole embraces a “rather modern attitude to family values,” accepting abortion, divorce, and sex before marriage as facts of life.Footnote 29 This claim is backed up by the fact that other prominent policies—especially the 2012 law requiring those engaged in political activities and receiving foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” and the 2013 “gay propaganda ban”—have circumscribed women’s organizing and women’s rights.Footnote 30
Gender and Russian Politics
Much has been written about gender inequality in Russia and gender in Russian politics since Putin’s rise to national power in 1999–2000, but little of it has analyzed this phenomenon of increased descriptive, but not substantive representation. Two important recent books suggest the Putin regime has politicized gender in ways that restrict women politicians’ ability to represent women. As Andrea Chandler documents, there had been a lot of international and women’s movement pressure for increasing women in politics as Putin came to power, which the regime either ignored or rejected.Footnote 31 Earlier proponents, such as the head of the Central Electoral Commission, withdrew their support, and the “tone of the debate changed when [Duma] deputies raised concerns about the impact that quotas might have on marriages and families.” Another attempt was made in 2005 but deputies voted no by not showing up for the vote. Valerie Sperling, drawing upon interviews with feminist activists, finds that not only was there resistance to these efforts, but sexism existed across the political spectrum. One activist asserted that “the few women in the Duma . . . [are] afraid to lose their power. Therefore, of course they have to stay absolutely within the bounds (v ramkakh), and say what they’re told to and no more.”Footnote 32 Another suggested that women in the Duma are there as “decoration” and “entertainment.” A third pointed to Putin’s remarks that women, regardless of their other positions in society, should not forget about “their civic duty of bearing children.”
These claims about the restrictions faced by women politicians are part of larger claims about gender politics fostering de-democratization under Putin. For Chandler, the limitations are part of the consolidation of paternalistic social policy, which she argues had been important to Putin’s success. The pro-Putin party (Unity which later became United Russia) learned from and co-opted the various approaches not just to social policy, but ways in which “women were trivialized in the political arena.”Footnote 33 As Putin replaced “a narrative of citizenship rights with a top-down narrative of a strong state, providing a wayward society with strong paternal control . . . Putin’s regime replaced the idea of women’s equality with the idea of the state’s protection of motherhood.”Footnote 34 For Sperling, the restrictions result from the politicization of sexism and homophobia. Homophobia, Sperling argues, is part of misogyny, as both represent a deepening of the regime’s commitment to a narrow and heteronormative role for men and women; together, they form an important legitimization strategy as Putin began to lose the support of the middle class after the country’s financial troubles in 2008–2009.Footnote 35 This research shows how gender ideology is key to understanding Putin’s power but ignores the reality that the proportion of women has increased, despite the expressed resistance to fast-tracking and the sexism in politics.
Unsurprisingly, the research that gets closest to the puzzle of descriptive without substantive representation is that which is focused specifically on women in Russian politics under Putin. Based on interviews with Duma deputies, Linda Cook and Carol Nechemias’ research follows the 2003 parliamentary elections, which brought a slight increase in the proportion of women in politics, explaining that women’s recruitment was less an attempt to advance women’s interests and more “a strategy designed to demonstrate that all groups and significant mass organizations were lined up in support of United Russia.”Footnote 36 Mapping ministerial and parliamentary elites under Putin, Elena Semenova finds that women are less connected to informal elite networks, coming through more constitutional avenues than men and less likely to leave politics for lucrative jobs at state-controlled oil and gas enterprises.Footnote 37 In a book analyzing the role of gender in Russian elections, Svetlana Aivazova finds that, in the 2007–2008 election cycle, the increasing sway of the United Russia party produced “contradictory results” with more women in politics but within a “traditionalist and ‘loyalist’ political culture, not civic or democratic” where the “law of strength—male strength—visibly outbalances the force of law.”Footnote 38 Elena Kochkina points to the increasing political manipulations after 2004 for which political parties work to appeal to the women electorate, including by promoting women in politics, but not providing them genuine agency; these women tend to be “stand ins . . . a demonstration without meaning,” with no commitment to real citizen participation in the process or equality.Footnote 39 Olga Popova finds a similar phenomenon among subfederal elite, in which women are super-responsible performers somewhere in the middle-management level or slightly above: they are “divas or “eye candy.”Footnote 40
This focused literature points to the interaction between the formal politics of elections and a variety of types of informal politics but lacks a conceptual framework, leaving an incomplete picture and one that is of little help for comparative analysis. Chandler and Sperling have the opposite problem in that their conceptual framework, like most of the scholarship on gender and post-communist politics, draws from the transition paradigm, in which the ideal types of democracy and authoritarianism shape the analysis, leaving obscured most of these informal politics. Answering the puzzle requires a conceptual framework of gender and informal politics.
Boxing in Fast-Tracked Women
I propose a comparative analytical framework that delineates the mechanisms of increasing descriptive without substantive representation in Putin’s Russia. It begins with the work of Helmke and Levistky, who define informal institutions as the “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels.”Footnote 41 I work within and across two subfields that are extending this research: the study of Russia’s regime dynamics and feminist institutionalism. The former represents the best of the literature on Russia and other non-Baltic, post-Soviet states, which has moved from the transition paradigm to one examining the interplay between of the informal with the formal, from a focus on “the ideal” to “the real” to capture regime dynamics.Footnote 42 Feminist institutionalism focuses on how “political institutions affect whether women can ‘act for’ women,” with the understanding that rules about how men and women are to behave—that is, gender—in intersection with other structural power dynamics such as race, class, and sexuality, are an intractable part of institutions.Footnote 43 In the last few years, feminist institutionalists have made politics an empirical question about “how things are done around here,” avoiding a “strict separation between informal and formal rules or prejudging their relative significance.”Footnote 44 In three steps, I use the Russian case to build an empirical framework that is gendered and bi-level, looking at the uneasy balance between the informal and the formal.
Fast-tracking Women through Informal Politics
First, women in Russian politics should be understood as being fast-tracked through informal politics. Despite the expressed resistance within the Duma to formal quotas documented by Chandler, there appears to have been an informal rule change to promote women by 2007.Footnote 45 This is evidenced not just in the influx of women that occurred around the time, but Putin signaled his desire to increase the number of women in politics in a 2007 press conference:
Is it necessary to introduce quotas? I don’t know, I am not ready to answer that question. It might be even worse to have some kind of discrimination according to sex. … But whether we are going to introduce quotas or not, we should certainly aspire to make authorities more balanced. The presence of women in the authorities always make them more balanced and more capable.Footnote 46
Seeing women’s political recruitment through informal politics is more credible than assuming that only formal policies could fast-track women in regimes like Russia. As shown by Alena Ledeneva, Henry Hale, and Karen Dawisha, recruitment into political power in Russia is not formalized, but based on informal elite networks established in the 1990s and institutionalized under Putin as head patron.Footnote 47 Since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, formal institutions and procedures have receded even further into the background.
Though ignored by these scholars, gender is central to this political recruitment in Russia, a reality most evident in the fact that the head patron in the system is Putin and almost all in the elite networks are men.Footnote 48 As Aivazova suggests, the increased personalization of politics makes it harder for outsiders like women who lack the necessary “administrative resources.”Footnote 49 As feminist institutionalist Elin Bjarnegård explains, “homosociality” (being of the same sex) can help individuals “understand and thus . . . predict each other’s behavior,” helping to build and maintain networks, something especially important in less than democratic regimes.Footnote 50 As elite networks have been “predominantly accessible for other men as well as more valuable when built between men,” they are gendered male. Networks also communicate their gendered values—what R.W. Connell conceptualized as “hegemonic masculinity” and “emphasized femininity”Footnote 51—to structure who is inside and who is outside the network. Hegemonic masculinity is the masculinity (among many in a society) that confers the most power, and a version of it is the ideal for political leaders. In contrast, women do not come to politics with the social capital of being male, with an easy way of meeting the criteria for being the (masculine) ideal political leader, or with the possibility of homosociality with those who dominate elite networks. Instead, they must enact the contextually appropriate emphasized femininity—the constructed gender for elite women that complements and complies with this hegemonic masculinity—to penetrate male-dominated networks.
Using these insights, the evidence suggests that the Putin regime’s networks have fast-tracked women in Russia for functions based on emphasized femininity (refer to table 2). As I illustrate, women in Russia have been recruited as “workhorses,” dependable performers without much career advancement, especially for posts identified as “feminine” for their association with care work. Some women have been recruited as “political cleaners,” updating the idea that women are too pure for politics.Footnote 52 Other women are cast as “showgirls” to legitimate elections and enlist support for the regime’s political party, a revival of the communist experience of token women, while some women become ultimate “loyalists” who advocate nondemocratic legislation to protect the regime, overcompensating in order to try to save their hides.Footnote 53
Table 2 Informal rules and women’s representation
Boxed in by Informal Rules
Second, while this informal fast-tracking may appear to achieve plum posts for women in Russian politics—expediting them past the obstacles of homosociality and hegemonic masculinity, sometimes even over similarly-placed men—the mechanisms that get them recruited then box them in. Sperling documents the significant gendered and homophobic hostility in Russian politics, but misses how these indicate informal rules. Ledeneva maps the informal rules that keep Russian elites in line, most notably, real or made-up compromising material (kompromat) as well as enforced solidarity and mutual cover-up (krugovaya poruka), but misses how they are gendered.Footnote 54 Despite her illustration of Russia’s krugovaiia poruka with a cartoon of men in suits standing in a circle with guns pointed at each other, Ledeneva does not see how the threat of elite-male violence is the enforcement for the Russian version of homosociality. Similarly, kompromat mixes allegations of abuse of office, disloyalty, or incompetence with titillating questions about sexual behavior, orientation, or sufficient masculinity. Russian siloviki (those from the former KGB and other coercive agencies) are especially reliant on these gendered informal rules. Not just virtually all male, they call for more order engineered by a strong state, with cultural traditions, such as secrecy, that help keep women out.Footnote 55
Bringing these insights together, I argue that elite women in Russian politics face informal rules constituted by a potent cocktail of sexism and the threat of humiliation or violence that make women more precarious than their male counterparts who have homosociality and masculinity as social capital. While all elites require patronage in Russian politics, patronage is a gendered relationship, and women must navigate between the male homosociality of their patrons and their other source of social capital, their emphasized femininity. The results are not-so-powerful or temporary jobs, in which women tend to be merely “stand-ins” (as Kochkina asserts) for men. I use the language of “boxes” to suggest the extent of coercion and the limited room in which even lucky women have to maneuver. Pushing against informal rules to gain more authority or try to represent women against the regime’s interests is likely to result in the exercise of enforcement mechanisms. While individual women in politics may try to work the system—with varying degrees of success and often for their own interests—they are not likely to represent women in any meaningful way.
Also Boxed by Informal Posts and Institutions
Third, elite women are mostly being fast-tracked into façades of representation and democracy, leaving them at the mercy of the many informal posts and institutions that exist in Putin’s Russia. As evidenced most clearly in Putin’s control even after he moved onto prime minister in 2008, formal posts can vary greatly based on the office holder, with real power in other posts lacking formal powers or having other specified formal powers. Over time, Putin’s regime has also institutionalized parallel, paraconstitutional, or informal institutions. In the executive, for example, there is now what amounts to a second government under the presidency. In the legislature, Russia’s Federation Council and Duma have been undercut by the establishment of the Praesidium of the State Council (in 2000) and the Public Chamber (in 2005).Footnote 56 Similarly, United Russia was created as a façade to mask the actual political competition that is para-political, that is “hidden and factional” between elites without popular constituencies or openly expressed agendas.Footnote 57 And, the regime “employs unfair electoral practices to an extent that deprives elections of their primary functions of political choice and elite circulation, and reduces them to a mere tool of legitimisation and mobilisation of support.”Footnote 58 Finally, while constitutionally federal, Putin’s Russia is practically centralized, with the exception of Chechnya where governor Ramzan Kadyrov has not just the constitutionally-established powers, but a “virtual monopoly over the legitimate use of force.”Footnote 59
As Richard Sakwa notes about the executive, these paraconstitutional institutions result from a long-standing strategy of duplicating administrative structures, “reflecting neither spontaneous social development nor formal provisions of constitutional law while not repudiating those provisions;” they may “get things done” in the short run, but in the long run, undermine “popular trust and promote self-interested behavior on the part of elites.”Footnote 60 As Thomas Remington explains about the legislature, these “parallel parliaments” allow Putin to “divert policy-making expertise and debate from the parliament to alternative arenas, which the president can consult at his pleasure.”Footnote 61 As a result, the constitutional legislatures have lost their influence over policy-making—Russian critics dub the Duma “the mad printer” for its fast passage of barely considered and arbitrarily implemented legislation—and lack any authority to check the executive.Footnote 62
Recognizing these parallel posts and informal institutions changes the way that increases in women in politics in Putin’s Russia should be understood because women are more likely to be found in the posts and institutions that have been emasculated by informal politics (refer to figure 1). These include the Public Chamber, the Duma, and the Federation Council and certain posts within the presidential administration and certain governorships. Scholars of women in Russian politics focus on formal arenas, drawing attention to numbers of women in the Duma, Federation Council, and cabinet. Perhaps a focus of study in itself, we cannot leave aside the political context and the reality that those institutions are subverted by parallel, more hidden arenas. In terms of the puzzle of increased descriptive without substantive representation, this informality reinforces the informal rules that box in women in politics, constructing and perpetuating male dominance and making representing women’s interests almost impossible.
Figure 1 Percent men in formal and informal institutions, 2013
Sources: See the Data Appendix in the Supplementary Materials
Putin’s Women
To illustrate and elaborate this framework for explaining the gap between descriptive and substantive representation, I examine five different political arenas in Russian politics seen as important by those who study women’s representation.Footnote 63 In each arena, I show that women were increasingly fast-tracked into formal posts at the same time that the importance of informal politics increased, leaving them boxed in.
1. Hypermasculinization of the Patronal Presidency
The exception that proves the (boxed in) rule is women being boxed out of the most powerful arena of Russian politics, the president and prime minister: all five prime ministers and the two presidents since 2000 have been men, with Putin (as president 2000–2008 and beginning in 2012, prime minister 1999 and 2008–2012) as the dominating figure.Footnote 64 As best conceptualized bv Hale, this is a patronal presidency in which one person heads a system “where individuals organize their political and economic pursuits primarily around the personalized exchange of concrete rewards and punishments . . . not primarily around abstract, impersonal principles.”Footnote 65 But Hale and others miss what Max Weber understood, that this kind of rule has a “patriarchal core” reliant on appeals to “political fatherhood”; “family arrangements and symbols are extended into the public sphere and . . . the ruler [claims that he] ‘owns’ his subjects as he does his wife and children.”Footnote 66 Putin’s masculinity schemes—posing as a sexualized tough-guy (muzhik), often with a bare sculpted chest or illustrating his manly prowess—are not just clever tactics. As Sperling has documented, the Kremlin has consciously cultivated Putin’s hegemonic masculinity in which he performs both his physical prowess and his ability “to get things done.”Footnote 67 This, in turn has facilitated his dominance of elite networks (as the man in charge) and his popular support (as the only man that women—and the whole country—should want). This hegemonic masculinity made it virtually impossible for even stand-in president Medvedev (let alone any woman) to replace him.
The only woman to run for Russia’s presidency is Irina Khakamada (in 2004), a former Duma deputy for a reformist party, who had been critical of Putin’s regime in the early 2000s. Lacking support from her party, she ran as an independent and won less than five percent of the vote. Several years before, when she advocated a woman president, an interviewer from one of the country’s best newspapers asked if this was a joke.Footnote 68 Within a few years, this misogynist sense of humor turned into an informal rule against women at the top of power in Russia. While implicit in Putin’s penchant for palling around with misogynist leaders such as Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi or seeming to congratulate the Israeli president for sexually assaulting women,Footnote 69 the enforcement mechanisms of the informal rule are most observable in threats made against women leaders (or potential leaders) of other countries. At one of his presidential residences, Putin let his dog approach German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seemingly amused at her bracing (she had previously been badly bitten by a dog).Footnote 70 To Hillary Clinton, Putin made a derisive penis joke: “At a minimum, a head of state should have a head.”Footnote 71
2. “Stand Ins” for Men in the Supporting Executive
While excluded from the dynamic duo of the premier and president, women have been fast-tracked into several executive posts, but in ways that leave them boxed in. Of the ministries seen as most powerful (security, economic, and deputy prime ministers), women have had the most presence as deputy prime ministers—Matvienko (1998–2003), Galina Karelova (2003–2004), and Olga Golodets (beginning in 2012)—a post that is less about expertise and more about loyalty; they tend to serve as gatekeepers for access to the prime minister and sometimes manage regional informal networks.Footnote 72 With no women heading security ministries, Elvira Nabiullina is the only woman to have served as economic minister, but she was brought in only after the big economic “reforms” of the 1990s and early 2000s when the spoils of the old regime were divvied up. She replaced the more connected and very wealthy German Gref, who went on to head Russia’s largest bank, and, during her tenure, the more lucrative trade responsibilities were transferred to a separate ministry.Footnote 73 As of summer 2016, facing a troubled ruble and economic sanctions, Nabiullina chairs the Central Bank, and is, as an anonymous insider at the bank put it, a “good technocrat,” ostensibly a “workhorse” in an impossible situation. Tatiana Golikova, head of the Accounts Chamber, is a similar situation. Several other women have been promoted as “workhorses” in care-related issues of family, children, health and welfare—posts which have been informally reserved for women—but also periodically as ministers of culture, agriculture, and labor. As Kochkina explains, these women tend to be brought in during periods of status quo and then moved out when substantial changes are made.Footnote 74 Sergei Lavrov, in contrast, has been foreign minister since 2004.
As Cook and Nechemias asserted about women in the Duma,Footnote 75 these fast-tracked women must have strong patrons. Matvienko has long had Putin’s support, marked by his campaigning for her first run as governor. Nabiullina, while having strong economist credentials and supported by an economically liberal coalition, has succeeded to the degree that she has because she is the protégé of Putin’s close friend and married to a chief theorist for Putin’s economic policy.Footnote 76 Golikova’s husband is a former minister and serves on the board of several state-controlled companies. Their participation in these networks, combined with their decorative functions, are marked by their wearing of lavish jewelry beyond their means.Footnote 77 But even these bridges into the informal networks mean less than homosociality; they must also show ultimate loyalty, illustrated in Matvienko frequently being the mouthpiece for the regime on controversial issues.
Men elites may experience the most drastic enforcement of informal rules. These range from apparently being murdered by the regimeFootnote 78 to the deployment of “honey pots” (in which an attractive woman captures men in compromising positions) or of kompromat (such as of Russia’s prosecutor general cavorting with prostitutes and of the former defense minister for having an affair).Footnote 79 However, gender-related hostility keeps women in the executive in line; without the benefits of homosociality, even more subtle, sexualized threats can carry great weight. During a 2006 European Union-Russian conference marking Russia’s clamping down on civil society, I experienced a taste at an informal gathering of Russian feminist activists when a self-identified silovik proposed a toast for the women in the room to find a “man who takes a long time to climax, that brings such relief to a woman, that it will take your minds off” of politics, rendering all the women in the room speechless. These kinds of hostility are complemented by public rumors. Even Matvienko, held up as the most successful woman in formal politics, has had to dodge allegations that she slept (earlier in her career) or drank (later in her career) her way to the top.Footnote 80
3. “Loyalists” in the Showcase Legislatures
Women being fast-tracked into legislative bodies is similarly problematic, first because both the Duma and the para-constitutional Public Chamber (which has varied between one-fifth and one-quarter women) are façade of representation. The increase in the Federation Council, the once more-powerful upper house, seems more meaningful, but it too has lost authority in Putin’s Russia, and Matvienko’s being elected chair in 2011 is seen by insiders as a demotion (from being governor) as well as a way to replace a previous (male) head who had been recalled by United Russia. As one opposition activist put it crassly to me, the Federation Council is where “they put the trash,” i.e., the politicians who are no longer valuable for the regime. The most powerful Praesidium of the State Council has had only two women (Matvienko and Kamorova, each with two six-month terms out of a total of 200 posts) since Putin came to power.Footnote 81
Second, these fast-tracked women are boxed into being “loyalists.” Several women deputies, most notably Irina Yarovaya, Elena Mizulina, and Ekaterina Lahkova, once members of the opposition, are now known for sponsoring hastily-conceived, ideological bills to signal their allegiance with Putin. For example, Lakhova championed a law banning adoption of Russian children by Americans as a reaction to the U.S. passage of the Magnitsky Act (which imposed sanctions against Russian elites seen as corrupt or having engaged in human rights abuses). Yarovaya co-authored the law calling for NGOs to be labeled as “foreign agents.” Mizulina sponsored legislation ostensibly to protect children from the internet, but which legitimated the regime’s censorship.Footnote 82 The only possible exception was Liudmila Shvetsova, the vice speaker of the Duma 2011–2014, who was a “workhorse” on social policy until her death (by natural causes).
The loyalist box for women, backed by threats of enforcement, was evidenced in the 2011 founding of a club to support women in politics, the Otlichnitsy, a reference to an obedient star (female) student. The group was founded by Olga Kryshtanovskaia, once a well-regarded political-sociologist of the Kremlin elite (from whom the New York Times still gets quotes), then a member of United Russia and “trusted person” who endorsed Putin’s 2012 presidential bid (she subsequently resigned from the party). According to Kryshtanovskaia (interview by author), the non-partisan group included some one hundred initiated members, including some from the Duma, Public Chamber, and Federation Council. While lobbying for women candidates, they are “post-feminist,” “women [who] want to use our beauty and greater sweetness,” “forbid criticism because we want a positive atmosphere,” and have added men as “beloved men of Otlitnitsy.” Within weeks of Putin’s announcement of his plans to return to the presidency, the group posted a happy birthday to Putin video on Youtube. Dressed in virginal white, nine women propose various birthday gifts, from jam to the white umbrella that Kryshtanovskaia offered to Putin, asking him to “please, protect us from all troubles, crises, and obstacles.” It was not just an odd spectacle from a surreal group, but, as one observer put it, Kryshtanovskaia’s new persona was probably driven by either being hit by a tree or have been “made an offer she could not refuse.”Footnote 83
4. “Showgirls” Legitimating Elections and the Party of Power
As hinted at by Kryshtanovskaia, women are also fast-tracked to legitimate and win elections, a goal of less than fully authoritarian regimes.Footnote 84 According to a Moscow-based insider, this is because women are especially well-suited to winning elections: women are “reliable, talkative, and attractive” (or at least know how to use femininity), and they are even cheaper as candidates (because “men tend to appear to loathe their constituents”). Some women are used as “showgirls,” a feminized version of the Russian practice of “locomotives,” nominating big names, such as celebrities, singers, and athletes (including a ballerina, a rhythmic gymnast, and a former Playboy model), to attract voters, then sometimes refusing to serve.Footnote 85 Once successful, they are portrayed as being kissed on the hand by their male counterparts, putting on make-up, or acting beautiful and silly.Footnote 86 As Kochkina summarizes, this “political landscape prevents them from developing their political positions and agency . . . and their initiatives are riddled with uncertainty, waste of human resources, and simulative political processes.”Footnote 87 The most prominent is the former gymnast, Alina Kabaeva, who is alleged to be Putin’s girlfriend and who, as recounted in confidential comments from a Moscow-based newspaper journalist, does not do any actual legislative work.Footnote 88
Yet, reflective of the elite networks that constitute United Russia, party leadership is overwhelmingly male, with all the chairs of United Russia having being men. As siloviki are prominent in the party, recruitment into the party leadership is a gendered informal process where interpersonal relations within a male dominated patronage network are key. Sperling points out several expressions of the party’s homophobia and sexism.Footnote 89 For example, in the 2011 Duma elections, United Russia ran an ad, “Let’s Do it Together,” in which women were cast as sexually insatiable (and the only reason to vote is to have sex). After the first protests, Medvedev re-tweeted a United Russia politician’s tweet which labeled opposition leader Alexei Navalny “a stupid, cock-sucking sheep.”
5. “Political Cleaners” for a Few Regions (not Chechnya)
Similarly, women have been fast-tracked as governors not to promote women’s interests but to serve the regime’s goals, primarily as “political cleaners.”Footnote 90 Prominently, Matvienko was brought in as governor of Saint Petersburg because the city had been a hotbed of corruption, the basis for Putin’s own corruption networks, and after Putin left for Moscow, his rival in corruption, Vladimir Yakovlev, became governor, continuing the predation and deterioration of the city’s infrastructure.Footnote 91 Matvienko was supposed to set things straight, as part of Putin’s propaganda that he was bringing order to Russia. Buffeted by activists who prevented her plan to site gas-giant Gazprom’s headquarters near the historic center of the city, the last straw for Matvienko was the public uproar over her inability to plan for effective snow and icicle removal, which led to hundreds of deaths and injuries.Footnote 92 Her tenure cut shorter than most of her male counterparts, Matvienko’s move to head the Federation Council deprived her of much opportunity for patronage perks.
Similarly, in Khanty-Mansi, Komarova replaced a long-term leader “who knew how to effectively achieve the necessary decisions, even at the federal level, and kept the region, as they say, in his fist.”Footnote 93 He had had perhaps too much power, and Komarova was less threatening: Putin called her to task early in her tenure for not managing programs well enough, but she was then praised for managing inter-elite conflicts (by including some of her predecessor’s team) and heading off protests (by including some opposition party members). In Murmansk, Kovtun, sponsored by Norilsk Nickel, the notorious metal giant that dominates the region, replaced a governor facing protests over cronyism and misappropriation of funds which halted the construction of a children’s hospital and left residents in the cold.Footnote 94 She too has achieved recognition for being able to balance competing interests while keeping the population appeased (such as by taking the unprecedented step of apologizing for a misstep).Footnote 95 In Vladimir, Svetlana Orlova replaced a Communist governor, one of the few non-United Russia governors left.
Yet the overwhelming majority of governors under Putin have been men, and homosociality is required for networking into real power in the regions. As Popova explains, women’s success in subfederal politics requires that they “make friends with the boss . . . and do what they say,” something that is harder for women to do since women are not the same sex or likely to have similar experiences as the mostly male bosses.Footnote 96 Ignored by most who write about regional power,Footnote 97 the reason why there had been virtually no women governors before Putin established his “power vertical” was because they had been strong patrons in their own right who relied upon hegemonic masculinity and homosociality to accrue and maintain power much as the patronal presidency. Under Putin—as governors no longer had to constitute their own regional power bases, but instead are chosen based on loyalty to the regime—women have been a better fit for the regime. With being a silovik an important background, the supergovernors heading the paraconstitutional federal districts have all been men, except for a half-year stint by Matvienko.
The remaining region-based patronalism is most evident in Chechnya, which is governed by a man who meets or even surpasses Putin’s hegemonic masculinity. Kadyrov was anointed as president as some Chechen rebels turned to terrorism when Putin needed the appearance of controlling Chechnya to lay claim to legitimate power. Kimberly Marten argues that Kadyrov’s rule is best understood as “warlordism” in which Kadyrov commands a private militia and controls local patronage networks, asserting gender is not at play since there has been at least one woman warlord (in Afghanistan).Footnote 98 I argue to the contrary: in even more extreme a fashion than in Putin’s patronalism, there is a gendered core in Kadyrov’s warlordism. Despite a bizarre penchant for posting pictures of himself cuddling cats on Instagram, Kadyrov’s authority relies on ruthless violence rationalized by his hegemonic masculinity: his large militia, with ID cards from the KGB successor, engages in gangsterism and state-authorized violence across Russia, while Kadyrov himself has openly defended brutal “honor” killings of women.Footnote 99
The Impossibility of Substantive Representation
With the dominance of informal politics in Russia, it is virtually impossible to see the process of negotiation over women’s substantive representation. The best available evidence are attempts at substantive representation in the mostly powerless Duma, which show just how little room there is to advance gender equality. The stories of Lakhova and Mizulina are indicative because they chaired the Duma committee charged with women’s issues and they themselves once identified as feminists.Footnote 100 Lahkova, who had headed Women of Russia and advocated family planning and quotas for women, was replaced as chair in 2007 when the regime moved toward pronatalism. As a result, and not long after the Orthodox press linked her to the feminism of Pussy Riot, she put forth the loyalist ban on U.S. adoptions.Footnote 101 Mizulina, who had been a member of the opposition and champion of anti-trafficking legislation passed in 2004, became chair of the committee in 2008 and very quickly did a “U-turn,” advocating policies the Orthodox Church identifies as “anti-gender,” including the laws restricting abortion, the ban on “gay propaganda,” and a proposal to tax divorce.Footnote 102 Galina Michaleva (interview by author), head of the gender faction of the opposition party Yabloko which lost national representation in 2007 and is the only party with feminism in it, explains that “today, there is no place for women in politics who help women.” She’s not quite right, as the Federation Council has become a dumping ground for women. Lakhova was moved there in 2014 and Mizulina in 2015, joining other elite women politicians (Karelova, who became vice chair in 2014, and Matvienko) who had once tried to represent women’s interests.Footnote 103
Conclusion
My purpose has been to explain why the fast-tracking of women in Russian politics over the last fifteen years has not led to the broader representation of women’s interests but the opposite. Bringing insights from the literature on gender in Putin’s Russia, Post-Soviet regime dynamics, and feminist institutionalism, I built a framework that delineates how the informal rules that fast-track women then boxed them in. Identifying the boxes as “workhorses,” “cleaners,” “showgirls,” “stand-ins,” and “loyalists”—with women more likely in façade of democracy than in the parallel and often more powerful informal institutions—I demonstrated these mechanisms through the examination of five political arenas in Russian politics. I showed how these political processes, especially the loyalist box where there is the most evidence in this opaque political system, not only limits women-politicians’ willingness and ability to substantively represent women, but incentivizes them to push for regressive policies. Instead of expanding women’s substantive representation, the increase in women’s descriptive representation has led to backlash, reinforcing male dominance and informal politics. There is little to suggest other opportunities. Feminist NGOs have also been boxed in, by the arbitrary enforcement of the repressive laws and disappearing funding. Pussy Riot came back swinging in 2016, with a video parodying the hypocrisy of the male-dominated elites claiming to be Orthodox Christian patriots but who embrace coercion and purloin resources.Footnote 104 Yet, the group gains more international than domestic attention. As I (with Meri Kulmala and Maija Jäppinen) have argued, the best prospect for more substantive representation is working the system by “speaking in code” to insider elites, sneaking gender equality initiatives under national concerns such as protecting the family.Footnote 105
This Russian study contributes to the new feminist institutionalism, building the case for the importance of informal institutions in maintaining and reproducing gender equality. Exploring how my framework travels requires more comparative study of how informal institutions may fast-track or box in women in politics. Other regimes may have different boxes for women, but at least the political cleaner box has already been identified as transnational. Pointing to leaders such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Nino Burdzhanadze of Georgia, and Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir of Iceland, Farida Jalalzai and Mona Lena Krook see this phenomenon as women tending to become executives during crises or transitions in which “normal” politics are suspended.Footnote 106 Anne Marie Goetz sees it as an expression of the anti-corruption literature’s claim that women are less corrupt.Footnote 107 Conceptualizing this box as informal fast-tracking points to the inherent obstacles and links it to other similar dynamics, such as the “widow’s path,” in which women come to power within dynasties, replacing dead fathers or husbands or succeeding them once constitutional term limits have been met.Footnote 108
Even when conventionally recruited or formally fast-tracked, women may be informally boxed in by informal rules or institutions. Male elites in the post-apartheid African National Congress resorted to “catcalls” and “sexist jokes” to discipline outspoken female MPs as part of a broader campaign to deny women important leadership positions.Footnote 109 In Argentina, where women have surpassed the so-called critical mass, those advocating gender equality were called “the 50-50 crazies.”Footnote 110 Janine Wedel has shown that even in places like the United States, non-elected, male-dominated institutions, especially on economic and security issues, have eclipsed the elected legislature with more women and constitutional authority.Footnote 111 The Russian case suggests that analyzing women in politics without taking informal politics seriously is inaccurate for authoritarian-leaning regimes, but such informal politics are likely crucial in more democratic regimes even as they are difficult to observe and measure.Footnote 112 With its focus on formal obstacles, such as the type and wording of quota laws, the literature on women’s representation tends to see informal politics as only an addendum.Footnote 113 This is true also of the synthetic literature on the impact of regime type on gender equality.Footnote 114
The analysis here has implications for those who advocate for more women in politics. Recognizing the persisting obstacles facing women in politics despite formal fast-tracking efforts, advocates have begun to bring attention to what they call “violence against women in politics,” physical attacks but also other forms of intimidation.Footnote 115 This is in an important step as it reveals how much coercion is embedded in the resistance to women’s representation. Seeing these as part of gendered informal politics suggests that this violence is the tip of the iceberg: the rare use of the enforcement mechanisms that maintain male dominance. Fast-tracking women may be akin to throwing women off a political “glass cliff,” as others have identified about bringing women into failing businesses.Footnote 116 Recommendations for formal fast-tracking such as quotas must be balanced by targeting informal rules, such as by training women to negotiate informal elite structures or to create social capital with the mostly male powerbrokers, as well as by continued pressure for democratic practices. Advancing both theory and praxis requires mapping both gendered and informal politics.
For those who study Russian politics, this study adds to Sperling’s and Chandler’s claim that gender is central to the consolidation of Putin’s regime. Whereas they find that sexism and homophobia support Putin’s authoritarian moves, I argue that gender—in the homosociality, hegemonic masculinity, and emphasized femininity essential to informal elite networks—more specifically helps rationalize informal rules and institutions. These insights challenge the study of Eurasian politics, which remains remarkably gender blind. Some scholars seem sympathetic to gender, but have a hard time seeing gender as about power and power as about gender, as in the blindness to the gendered core of the concepts of patronalism and neopatrimonialism. Others are openly resistant. A few years ago, one of the senior scholars of Russian politics—when I asked him why there was no consideration of gender in a large project on Russia he was co-leading—answered, “It is as if we were at a zoology conference on elephants, and you asked about monkeys.” His counterpart chimed in that he would be happy to include research on gender if there was any good empirical gender research. These reactions indicate the continued existence of informal rules—about gender analysis as separate or unscientific—that circumscribe the field, even as the study of Putin’s Russia can bring much insight about the centrality of both gender and informal politics to power.
Supplementary Materials
• Explanatory File
• Data Appendix
