THE INFLUENCE OF INTEREST GROUPS ON THE MILITARY POLICY SUSTAINABILITY IN RUSSIA (2007 – 2012) By Kirill Shamiev Submitted to Central European University School of Public Policy in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Public Policy Supervisor: Associate Professor Thilo Bodenstein CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2018 Copyright Notice I, the undersigned, Kirill Shamiev, hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. To the best of my knowledge this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted as part of the requirements of any other academic degree or non-degree program, in English or in any other language. This is a true copy of the thesis, including final revisions. Date: June 14, 2018 Name: Kirill Shamiev Signature: CEU eTD Collection i Abstract The security status-quo in Russia from 2007 to 2012 is often described as the period of "Serdyukov reforms". During these six years Russian armed forces faced unprecedented changes that affected their structural, economic, social and ideological elements. However, despite the outstanding political and financial support for the defense minister, Anatoliy Serdyukov, from Vladimir Putin and Dmitrii Medvedev, not all aims were fulfilled and some changes were rolled back. This research examines the role of interest groups in the sustainability of the military policy of that period. Using the theoretical framework of minimum winning coalitions in the policy process of non-democratic state, the research shows that the reformers faced formal and informal resistance from mobilized interest groups which they could not overcome considering the existing political and administrative limitations of the period. Ultimately this process led to the resignation of the defense minister and stopped further radical changes in the contemporary Russian armed forces. CEU eTD Collection ii Acknowledgements This research was accomplished with the financial support from CEU Budapest foundation in the form of MA Short Research grant. I would like to thank my supervisor Thilo Bodenstein for supporting before and during the writing process; professor Nick Sitter for helping me on the final stage of the writing process; and Zsuzsanna Toth for her outstanding editorial support. I would also like to express my gratitude to Viktoriia Poltoratskaia for her spiritual support and recommendations for the theoretical framework of the work, Lika Mchelidze for outstanding help with the figures, and Liza Potapova for helping with the preparation for the interviews and giving important advices for the data analysis. I would also like to thank Alexander Belkin, the director of international programs of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP) in Moscow, for being so open and solicitous about my research. CEU eTD Collection iii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 1 Theoretical framework and hypotheses............................................................................................ 3 Scientific relevance and methodology .............................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1. Intersecting Interest Groups, Reform Sustainability, Political Economy and Institutions ................... 8 1.1 Definitions and Functions: from Theory to Policy Practice..................................................... 8 1.2 Reform Sustainability: Evidence from Russia .......................................................................... 11 1.3 The Russian Political Economic System: Actors or Institutions? .......................................... 13 1.4 Russian Political Institutions: Stability vs Effectiveness ......................................................... 16 Chapter 2. The Policy Cycle of the Serdyukov Reform: Looking for Sustainability .......................................... 19 2.1 Agenda Setting and Policy Formulation ................................................................................... 19 2.2 Policy Legitimation .................................................................................................................... 23 2.3 Policy Implementation, Evaluation and Termination ............................................................. 26 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 35 Appendix ................................................................................................................................................. 38 Appendix 1. Interview Table ........................................................................................................... 38 Appendix 2. Female Leadership in MoD during Serdyukov period ............................................ 39 CEU eTD Collection References ................................................................................................................................................. 40 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Military threats perception and attitudes towards the armed forces (percentage of positive answers). ................................................................................................................................................ 21 Figure 2. Serdyukov's Coalition of Reformers ................................................................................... 25 Figure 3. Structural reforms timeline .................................................................................................. 28 CEU eTD Collection v List of Tables Table 1. Interest Groups Coalitions in the Military Policy ................................................................ 32 CEU eTD Collection vi Introduction Why some policies are sustainable and succeed in fulfilling their goals and others are not is one of the core questions of political science and public policy as an academic discipline. Indeed, any policy is a complex social phenomenon consisting of several levels and stages from problem framing to policy evaluation. Therefore, ensuring policy sustainability, especially after radical changes, is a challenging task for the government. Strategically policy-makers have two distinct approaches to reforms. They may push for their proposal regardless of interest groups and political opposition, or they may include interest groups in the decision-making process. The former needs sufficient state autonomy (Skocpol 1985), meaning the possibility of the state to implement decisions regardless of the society and/or interest groups. The latter makes stakeholders interested in policy continuation, and the final policy proposal itself implicitly secures the state’s capacity for its implementation in exchange for the achievement of socially desired goals (Skocpol 1995). However, these are the ideally opposite strategies, but in practice the policy is a constantly changing mixture of coercive implementation and agreements with interest groups. This is why the aim of this research is to evaluate the interest groups influence on military policy sustainability. According to Huntington (1957), military policy formulation differs from one polity to another, because of the variations in military elite autonomy. Moreover, military expertise is needed in formulation of effective and efficient defence policies (Avant 2007). Therefore, military agencies (armed forces, defence industries, security councils) could affect government’s policies, sometimes leading to unexpected results and policy failures, even despite low level of military autonomy. Contemporary academic literature has focused on the participation of the military in CEU eTD Collection politics and threats to democratic development (Geddes, Frantz, and Wright 2014), but how various military related interest group can influence the development of policies has been largely left under-researched. This dearth of research is even more surprising in the case of the radical change in military autonomy expressed in a new military reform dictated by the civilian authorities 1 after years of the military’s monopoly on its own development. This uncovered perspective in the literature becomes more compelling in the case of contemporary Russia when its armed forces faced perhaps the most radical change since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The research question therefore is as follows: how did interest groups influence the military reform in Russia in the 2007-2012 period? The case of Russia’s military reform is worth examination for several reasons. First of all, as I mentioned above, starting from 2007 Russia’s military policy has dramatically changed for the first time since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. However, the initial plan of the reform was not implemented, even despite the influence of the war in Georgia in 2008. The reform caused massive criticism and finally led to the resignation of the Defense minister in 2012. However, some decisions were not reversed even after the Minister’s resignation. Secondly, I consider the defence sector as the core part of the state’s raison d'être. The state initially appeared and continued its existence for the security of its citizens exercising power over its enemies and population (Hay, Lister, and Marsh 2006). Despite being dedicated to