Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

7 Russian political parties and regionalpolitical processesThe problem of effective representationPetr PanovPolitics in the contemporary era, in contrast to former traditional ‘dynasticstates’ and ‘empires’, is based to a large extent on democratic discourse.Even under authoritarian regimes ruling elites, while attempting to removeopposition from the political arena, try to reinforce their legitimacy by convincingthe population (the masses) that they truly represent the interests ofthe people. In competitive regimes this issue is even more pressing becausepower is sought by various political forces, each of which tries to make itselflook appealing to the masses. It is only when the masses perceive the ‘politicalclass’ as their own representatives that a legitimate political order arisesand the effectiveness of political representation can be discussed as an issue.It is our understanding that this problem is one of the key issues inmodern Russia. Under Soviet authoritarianism the leaders used to inculcateamongst the masses the idea that communism is the embodiment of popularexpectations and aspirations, and the regime remained durable as long aspeople continued to believe that the Communist Party did express their will.The disillusionment that was mounting in the 1970s and 1980s became oneof the precursors of Perestroika. In post-Soviet Russia a radical redistributionof resources has taken place: instead of a unitary political actor (theCommunist Party) a multitude of actors have appeared. At the same timedemocratic political procedures have been introduced. These developmentspreconditioned the transition to a competitive type of political process butwere hardly sufficient enough to solve the problem of the ‘effectiveness ofpolitical representation’.Political representation is an extremely complex and multi-faceted phenomenon.In different combinations its various dimensions bring about adifferent outcome in terms of its effectiveness. The aim of this chapter is todetermine which characteristics of representation dominate in modernRussia, to explain why, and to analyse the consequences of our findings fromthe viewpoint of their effectiveness. At the same time we focus on the regionallevel of Russian politics, which has been far less researched than thenational level. 1The chapter is structured in the following way: at the beginning severaltheoretical models of representation are analysed (I take as the basis such