Search results

As Russia's post-communist regime descends deeper into authoritarianism, protest politics has become a regular feature of the political landscape. As such, President Putin increasingly faces the "dictator's dilemma": How much coercion to deploy against protesters without incurring a social backlash against the regime? That question more generally is now part of analytical consideration in comparative scholarship on social movements and contentious politics. This article contributes to the comparative discussion, first, through an elaboration of an original conceptual typology of protest-policing strategies, applicable to democratic and authoritarian regime types. Second, the article applies this conceptual scheme to Russia to illustrate the variant protest-policing strategies employed during the post-communist period. The research explains how Putin's authoritarian regime responded to the challenge of the dictator's dilemma by enacting protest-policing reforms. Inspired by policing trends in the Western democracies, these reforms entail a shift from confrontation-based to containment-based tactics. The article shows variation and adaptation in the way protesters were policed across Russia's transition from unconsolidated democracy to consolidated authoritarianism. Finally, the article suggests the consequences of protest-policing reform for the ruling regime.

After a long period waiting in the wings, the Fisc (the state treasury, or the larger system of public finance) has returned to center stage in comparative politics. During this time, fiscal sociologist Joseph Schumpeter was more likely to be cited for his "creative destruction" thesis, than for his "crisis of the tax state" analysis. While the "return to the state" dates back to the late 1970s, it still took another decade before taxation became a monograph headliner, with influential works by Margaret Levi (Of Rule and Revenue, 1988), Charles Tilly (Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992, 1992) and Sven Steinmo (Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State, 1996). Since then, tax policy and extractive capacity have increasingly come to be recognized by comparativists as central to state-building projects, thus confirming Edmund Burke's old adage that "the revenue of the state is the state." As part of this fiscal revival in comparative politics, Aaron Schneider has rightfully earned the status as leading expert on Central America with his new book, State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America.

This dialogue might strike some readers as more amicable than critical, as the two books concur on core assumptions about the comparative politics of taxation and state building. They both prefer a macrosocial analytical framework to explain political institutional outcomes, focus on elite motives and actions as the main causal factor, and provide a historically grounded analysis. Also, both books advance recent scholarship on a neofiscal sociology in comparative state-building theory. Aaron Schneider's review, however, does note two underdeveloped themes in my study of postcommunist tax states, which rightly deserve response.