From the presidency to presidentialism: the evolution of the Russian model

This article addresses a central question in contemporary comparative politics: how do formal institutions, often democratic by design, coexist with political practices that ensure a high concentration of power and limit genuine political competition in the post-Soviet space? The study focuses on the phenomenon of strong presidential power, employing a neoinstitutional approach to bridge the gap between formal-legal and personalist analyses. The key conceptual contribution of the article is introducing and operationalizing an analytical distinction between “presidency” (the formal constitutional institution) and “presidentialism” – the de facto political regime characterized by the dominance of a personalized executive, whose actual influence significantly surpasses its formal constitutional status through reliance on informal and paraconstitutional practices.

Using the process-tracing methodology, the article argues that the formation of Russian presidentialism was not a random occurrence but rather a logical, two-stage causal process. First, the political crisis of the early 1990s led to the creation of a broad formal foundation in the form of the super-presidential Constitution of 1993. Second, the practical inadequacy of these formal rules for ensuring complete control spurred the purposeful creation of informal and paraconstitutional practices (such as the “power vertical”, succession and prolongation technologies), which have become the core of the emergent political regime.

The concluding part of the article briefly examines certain elements of the Russian model that have proven to be in demand in other post-Soviet countries, which allows for conclusions about the most reproducible mechanisms of its stability.

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