Institutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: Pension Reform in Russia and China

Historical institutionalism has demonstrated the value of close analysis of policymaking to explain institutional change. Scholars have distinguished four patterns of institutional change: drift, conversion, layering, and displacement. This paper analyzes pension reform in Russia and China to illustrate institutional change in bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. While policymaking in both countries takes place almost entirely within the state bureaucracy, in China, state authority is much more decentralized than in Russia. This difference helps to explain the difference in the patterns of policy change that we observe in the two cases: periodic abrupt reversals in Russia vs. incrementalism and layering in China.