ISSUES, IDENTITIES, AND PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES. THE EMERGING RUSSIAN PARTY SYSTEM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE BY

research assistance in the preparation of this paper we would like to thank Jody Cornish and Kirk Hawkins. 1 The task of this paper is to report some tentative results from a survey among Russian politicians about the programmatic structuration of the Russian party system. Our research is motivated by our previous work. On the one hand, we have conducted in-depth studies of candidate strategies in Russian parliamentary elections (Smyth 1997). The basic theoretical argument here is that politicians quickly learn to take advantage of the institutional opportunities of the electoral system and the local resources in the political setting where they compete. On the other, we have completed a comparative study of programmatic crystallization and party competition in four East Central European polities (Kitschelt et al. 1997). The theory that explains variance among the patterns of party system formation encountered in these countries has implications for Russia. It argues that historical legacies, configured around the institutions and processes of the late communist polity, mediated by actors ’ rational strategies to advance their control of positions of power in the new democratic polities account for different pathways of democratic competition in post-communist countries. Placing Russia in a comparative setting, its system of party competition should look more like Bulgaria’s than that of Central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. At the same time, there are institutional differences between Bulgaria and Russia in the new democratic order that lead us to expect less programmatic structuring in Russia. Our account attacks two other common perspectives on post-communist politics. First, there is a tabula rasa vie