The Difficulty of Building State Capacity and Quality in the Coercive Realm

It should be acknowledged at the outset that there is no “magic bullet” for creating civil states with high capacity and quality. Optimal solutions to

“Instrumental Democracy? The End of Ideology and the Decline of Russian Political Parties,” in Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reissinger, eds., The 1999-2000 Elections in Russia: Their Impact and Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 163-185; Ken Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies, 35, 3 (July 1983), pp. 275-297. I take the phrase “unrule of law” from Gel’man 2004. Tendler 1997, p. 141.

Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 29; Taylor 2003, pp. 12, 17. On “total organizations,” see: Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961).

Bayley 1985, p. 169; Marenin 1985, p. 109.

A model of “predatory policing” is applied to Russia in: Theodore P. Gerber and Sarah E. Mendelson, “Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?” Law and Society Review, 42, i (2008), pp. 1-43. The military realm also has been marked more by “institutional decay” than the building of state capacity or quality: Zoltan Barany, Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Organizational dilemmas vary considerably depending on factors such as the type of agency, available technology, and social factors. Fukuyama states, “instead of equilibria or Pareto optimal solutions to organizational problems, there are continuous tradeoffs along a series of organizational dimensions.”58 If state building is never easy, there are good reasons to believe it is particularly hard to monitor and control the behavior of coercive agencies, especially law enforcement ones. Most noticeable, perhaps, is that state coercive agents by definition possess the physical means for demanding citizen compliance. Analysts of law enforcement have noted the potentially wide gap between “police power,” in terms of the formal laws and rules that regulate police functions, and “police action” - the actual behavior of the police.59

More generally, both Fukuyama and Wilson have proposed typologies of organizations that suggest law enforcement is one of the most difficult areas to reform. Fukuyama distinguishes between “transaction volume” (the number of regular decisions made by an organization) and “specificity” (the ability to monitor organizational outputs). An area like central bank reform is marked by low “transaction volume” and high “specificity” and is thus most amenable to technocratic solutions that draw on the new organizational economics and principal-agent models. In contrast, a high transaction volume/low specificity area like law enforcement is much more complicated, thus demanding greater attention to “local constraints, opportunities, habits, norms, and conditions.” A similar idea is found in Wilson’s distinction between four types of agencies (production, procedural, craft, coping) based on whether outputs (bureaucrats’ activities) and outcomes (results of those activities) can be observed. Policing, in Wilson’s schema, is a difficult area to reform because it is a “coping” organization in which it is difficult for supervisors both to watch what the average cop is doing and assess whether the cop’s activities contribute to public order and crime reduction. The considerable autonomy of most police officers led Weber to refer to them as the “representative of God on earth.”60 While remaining mindful of the difficulties of reforming any state agency, particularly large ones with guns, I argue in this book that a misguided approach to state building has hurt both state capacity and especially state quality in post-Soviet Russia. This is particularly true of Vladimir Putin, who squandered important resources he had available to him (a rapidly growing economy, high personal popularity) and undermined his goal of building a strong and effective Russian state. Under Putin, coercive agencies increased their capacity to carry out extraordinary tasks, such as the repression of economic and political rivals to the state leadership. But they did not improve that much in carrying out their routine tasks of fighting crime and terrorism and

Protecting private property rights. Further, they remained corrupt and unaccountable to society. If building capacity and quality in the coercive realm is particularly difficult, it is also particularly important, especially for law enforcement agencies, if popular trust in and commitment to the state is to increase. To an important extent, especially from the point of view of average citizens, “the quality of policing is the quality of ruling.”61

Table 1.1 contrasts the bureaucratic type, monitoring approach, and dominant mission of Russian state coercive agencies under Putin with those that would be required for a high-quality, civil state. These three basic elements of a state-building strategy correspond with the three basic ways in which the police are held accountable, as outlined by Marenin: “by the fact that they are employees, by their own sense of what good policing means, and by the influence of other groups and organizations on them.”62

The challenge facing President Dmitriy Medvedev since taking office in 2008 has been whether to continue Putin’s state-building strategy, which has emphasized building state capacity to repress and has tolerated considerable corruption and predation by coercive agencies, or whether to adopt a radically different approach that stresses state quality and the rule of law.63

The prospects for a new strategy under Medvedev are discussed in the last chapter. Overall, if the story I tell about state building in Putin’s Russia is convincing, the book will provide one illustration of the benefit of “bringing the gun back in” to the comparative politics literature on the state.