Contextualizing critical junctures: what post-Soviet Russia tells us about ideas and institutions

The present article asks what lessons the empirical case of institutional change in post-Soviet Russia yields for the recent research on ideas and institutions. Its main point is that in post-Soviet Russia a clash between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic background ideas led to an ideatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and society 2018-06, Vol.47 (3), p.409-435
Main Author: Zweynert, Joachim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
Critical junctures
Economic policy
Economic reform
Industrialized nations
Institutional change
Institutions
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Postcommunist societies
Social Sciences
Sociology
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Summary:The present article asks what lessons the empirical case of institutional change in post-Soviet Russia yields for the recent research on ideas and institutions. Its main point is that in post-Soviet Russia a clash between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic background ideas led to an ideational division among the elite of the country that became a main obstacle to the provision of coherent economic reforms. This story stands in some contrast to much of the newer literature on ideas and institutions, which tends to see critical junctures as leading from one equilibrium to another. I argue that tensions between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic backgrounds are likely to occur in other cases of far-reaching processes of institutional change based on Western ideas but taking place beyond the realm of Western, industrialized countries. Therefore, I argue, some general lessons on the interplay between ideas and institutions might be drawn from this case study.
ISSN:0304-2421
1573-7853
DOI:10.1007/s11186-018-9319-5