Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia

The Putin-Medvedev transition reveals the continuing inability of post-Soviet Russian leaders to arrive at any consensual notion of Russia’s national identity around which ordinary forms of legitimate domination might be constructed. In searching for an answer to the problem of leadership succession during his second term as president, Vladimir Putin tried out all three of the classical types of legitimate domination that Max Weber defined—the traditional, the rational-legal, and the charismatic—without success. In the end, the 2008 elections represented a novel combination of strategies for building state legitimacy that we might term “plebiscitarian patrimonialism”: the Russian leadership claims the right to rule as if the state were its personal property, as long as the results of this arbitrary rule are electorally ratified by “the people” as a true reflection of the national will.