Zhirinovsky and the Power of Nationalism

RFE/RL has a good story today about the ways in which Russian governance is closer to the wack-a-doo ideas of Vladimrir Zhirinovsky than is comfortable.  I read the article with interest and reminisced about a paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar in comparative politics during my third year of graduate school in the Fall Semester of 2010.

The paper that I wrote was titled: Punching above Their Weight: Nationalist Parties in Presidential Systems.  The inspiration for the paper was the rise of the influence of Zhirinovsky in Russian politics.

I think that the idea of the paper was pretty good - although my execution of it was pretty limited.  Here is a piece from my theoretical set up from the paper:

Nationalist parties can occupy an important ideological space. Nationalist parties have their own policy preferences, and those preferences are communicated to the public. If the ideological space occupied by a nationalist party becomes a salient issue which a president must “own” in order to maintain office specifically and legitimacy more generally, then that party has “ideological blackmail potential.” This ideological blackmail potential will differ from polity to polity based on institutional and ideological factors.

The basic idea is that nationalist parties stake out key policy points that are sometimes incredibly salient.  In the case of Russia, the LDPR has occupied the space related to anger over the loss of great power status, the desire for international respect, and the idea that Russia has a special mission in the world.  Putin, because of domestic economic factors, has needed to use some of these themes to maintain support.  That usage comes at a cost - and part of that is adopting some of the more radical language espoused by the LDPR.  It means giving Zhirinovsky more power than he would have based on actual support for his total platform.


Presidential Susceptibility to Ideological Blackmail

		Nationalist Ideology
		Nationalist	Cosmopolitan
Institutional Constraints on Presidential Power	Strong	Low/Med	Low
	Weak	High	Low

Watching Russia is never boring.