President, economic crisis and logic of coalition politics in contemporary Russia

States that are dependent on world oil prices are especially vulnerable during the economic crisis. However, many petrostates retain stability. If the sources of stability of authoritarian petrostates during the period of high oil prices are well studied, the basics of the political survival of such regimes in crisis conditions remain unclear. This article analyzes Russia's political processes in the period 2012-2018 to study the main factors of the political sustainability of the regime in a crisis. I argue that political stability during this period was conditioned not only by the presence of oil rent, preventive government measures to create state reserves and other favorable economic factors of the past years. Strategic actions of the president played no less a role, aimed at 1) adjusting the economic course of the government to take into account political interests and accomplish the electoral objective of 2018; 2) maintaining a stable (self-enforsing) ruling coalition. I demonstrate the course and political consequences of decision making in Russia on the issues of spending state reserves and privatization of the largest state corporations. I show also that the specific direction of these decisions was conditioned by the intervention of the president to protect their political interests. The analysis of personnel policy and elite interactions with the help of formal modeling allowed to reveal the logic of transformation of the ruling coalition and to reveal the significance of this process for maintaining the stability of the political regime.

президент, кризис, политик, коалиции, политический режим, авторитаризм, Россия, president, crisis, politics, coalitions, political regime, authoritarianism, Russia

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