A Failed Experiment?

Three and a half decades ago, the Russian Federation emerged as the successor state of the USSR. In the years that followed, there were high hopes that Russia would evolve into one of the world’s leading democracies. However, today, those democratic aspirations lie in ruins. This is the case as political breakthroughs came to a halt in the 21st century, when Vladimir Putin rose to power and solidified his grip on power. However, Russia’s democratic trajectory remains an interesting case within the post-Soviet republics, as one who transitioned to democracy briefly but ultimately returned to an authoritarian and dictatorial regime. According to Leonardo Morlino’s “Quality of Democracy”, a good democracy can be defined by three dimensions: (1) procedural level— measured by rule of law, vertical accountability, horizontal accountability; (2) content level— measured by political legitimacy and responsiveness of institutions to popular demands; (3) results level— measured by political and civil rights. While there is a scholarly debate on the extent of Russia’s decline of democracy on the basis of these three dimensions (Diamond, 2015), there is a clear consensus among scholars that Russia has not been a democracy for a plethora of years. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the evolution of Russian democracy on the basis of Morlino’s three dimensions across three different years, namely: 2005, 2014, and 2020.