NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY The Infrastructure of Authoritarianism: State‐Society Relationships, Public Sector Organizations, and Regime Resilience in Putin's Russia A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Sociology By Natalia Forrat EVANSTON, ILLINOIS September 2017 2 Abstract This dissertation uses the case of Putin’s Russia to examine how authoritarian regimes build relationships with their societies in a way that strengthens authoritarian rule. In contrast to the existing scholarship, which concentrates on redistributive politics, that is, on the autocrat’s capacities to buy the loyalty of the masses, I suggest an infrastructural mechanism of authoritarian resilience, which is alternative and complementary to redistribution. This infrastructural mechanism is linked to Michael Mann’s concept of infrastructural state power, i.e. the ability of the state to penetrate society to the grass roots level. I argue that the embeddedness of state organizations in people’s everyday lives allows an autocrat to control lower level political processes even without redistributing significant amounts of goods. Particularly valuable for such infrastructural control are organizational hierarchies and networks in the social public sector – education, healthcare, community and social services. In societies similar to the Russian one, such organizations share three important qualities that allow them to enhance infrastructural state power significantly. These qualities are (1) embeddedness in people’s everyday lives, (2) population’s trust, and (3) direct connection to the state apparatus. They make social public sector employees more convenient and effective agents of the regime than police officers, bureaucrats, or party activists. This dissertation also suggests that the distinction between infrastructural and redistributive mechanisms stems from two different patterns of state‐society relationships or, in other words, that the role of public sector organizations in authoritarian resilience depends on the pre‐existing pattern of state‐society relationships. Under the integrative pattern, people view the state as the embodiment of the public will, cooperate with it at the community level, and allow state officials to build or mediate community ties. In such an environment, social public sector organizations form an administrative 3 machine that routinely manages grass roots politics and makes the regime less dependent on redistribution. Under the autonomous pattern, people conceptually detach the state from the public will and resist the state’s attempts to intervene in community matters. In such an environment, communities turn the state’s requests for cooperation into bargains for material resources, making the regime directly dependent on the redistribution of material perks. To demonstrate the infrastructural mechanism of authoritarian resilience and the two patterns of state‐society relationships empirically, I use a quantitative subnational comparison and five case studies. Through the analysis of the regional variation of the 2012 presidential election results, I show that Putin’s regime used schoolteachers for agitation and electoral fraud. Schoolteachers, who are usually trusted by the population, frequently serve as members of precinct‐level electoral commissions, and state officials forced them to commit fraud under the threat of job loss. This mechanism allowed Putin to win the election convincingly and demonstrate the strength of the regime to the public at the critical moment when the regime’s popularity decreased. Through the historical study of Kemerovo region, which has been an outlier on the Russian electoral map that supported Putin’s regime in large numbers, I show how the long‐term regional governor, Aman Tuleev, has used social public sector organizations to manage mass politics in the region. In particular, I describe the history of his relationships with the pensioners’ organizations and residential committees to show that an autocrat may deliberately develop social public sector organizations for the purpose of increasing infrastructural state power rather than increasing redistribution. The two patterns of state‐society relationships manifest themselves in the comparison of the two groups of regions, those with high and low infrastructural power according to the results of the quantitative analysis. As I show through interviews, media publications, and organizational documents, 4 in the regions with high infrastructural power, the Kemerovo region and the Republic of Tatarstan, social public sector organizations work as a centralized administrative machine routinely used for monitoring grievances and mobilization of the population for regime‐supported projects. In the regions with low infrastructural power, the Rostov region and the Republic of Altai, public sector organizations defend their autonomy from the state apparatus while actively contributing to clientelistic political practices. In the Tomsk region, which occupied a middle position between these two groups, I observed a mixture of integrative and autonomous patterns. This interaction effect of the integrative and autonomous patterns of state‐society relationships on the work of social public sector organizations can have a larger application in studies of other aspects of mass politics. Researchers of bureaucracies, corruption, popular protests, and democratization can incorporate this variable in their analysis as I have done for the study of infrastructural state power. The introduction of these two patterns of state‐society relationships as an interaction variable may help reconcile the contradictory findings of previous studies into a coherent theoretical model. 5 Acknowledgements This dissertation owes a debt of gratitude to a number of individuals and institutions. I would like to thank my dissertation committee – Ann Orloff, Bruce Carruthers, Linda Cook, and James Mahoney – for years of intellectual, organizational, and moral support that I received from the time I conceived this project to its current stage. The Department of Sociology and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University have provided an institutional home and material support that made this dissertation possible. Northwestern University Library has not only provided one of the best offices on campus but also responded to my research needs by signing up for the much needed Integrum database. Special thanks for the latter go to Jeannette Moss. My fieldwork was greatly facilitated by people and institutions in different parts of Russia. I thank the Department of Sociology at Tomsk State University and personally Artem Rykun for providing a local affiliation during my fieldwork year. Anna Tolkacheva, Elena Ialbacheva, Margarita Astoiants, Maria Abramova, Olga Shvakova, Raisa Adarina, Sergei Biriukov, and Svetlana Tiukhteneva have greatly helped with local insights and logistics. The librarians of the local history department at Kemerovo regional library have provided very generous and highly professional help by introducing me to some of the secrets of library science. As I worked to analyze and understand the data I collected, I had a number of opportunities to present my research and receive useful feedback. For that, I thank the participants of the Comparative‐ Historical Social Science workshop at the Buffett Institute and the participants of the writing group organized by Ann Orloff. I also thank Bill Reisinger and Ted Gerber for inviting me to present parts of this dissertation at the Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin‐Madison, which have been valuable experiences. The last stages of the analysis and most of the writing have been completed during my pre‐ doctoral fellowship at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford 6 University. I thank all the faculty, fellows, and staff at the Center for welcoming me to the sunny California and providing both material resources and a lot of intellectual stimulation. My very special thanks go to Kathryn Stoner, Frank Fukuyama, and all the post‐doctoral fellows of my cohort. Finally, I want to thank my family and particularly my parents, Liubov and Vladimir Forrat, who provided a home to return to from all my journeys and who facilitated all my achievements by never caring much about them. 7 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. 5 List of Tables and Figures ....................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 1. Authoritarianism, infrastructural power, and the social public sector ................... 14 The social public sector as a missing component of infrastructural state power ..................... 15 Empirical findings ....................................................................................................................... 17 Theoretical argument ................................................................................................................ 19 Authoritarian resilience ............................................................................................................. 21 Authoritarian resilience and the politics of redistribution .......................................................