Vladimir Putin Authoritarianism Analysis

In Authoritarianism Russia, Vladimir Gel’man discusses how he views government in two simple forms: democracies and non democracies (authoritarianism fitting into the category “nondemocratic”). Vladimir Putin runs a model of electoral authoritarianism using a facade of democracy. Putin manipulates political elites and the masses to achieve maximum power. Gel’man gives readers insight on the ways Putin’s model is both helping him gain power, and hurting him from gaining power. Putin uses electoral authoritarianism to strengthen his power through a facade of democracy by running unfair elections, and by controlling the media. This is allowing him to control the outcome and provide legitimacy of democracy. It is also allowing him to control what the citizens know, altering their view on his government. Within his facade of democracy his power is also being weakened from the limitations put on his power of oppression, the obligation to follow the constitution, dependency on the economy, and his requirement to comply with the elites demands. This is damaging to him because it allows riots and oppositions to form requires him to step down from office and risk his popularity on uncontrollable factors. With

At the end of his second term, he had the ability to change the constitution to grant himself more terms. However, using this ability would come across in a negative light from a democratic view-point. Which resulted in a “temporary job swap between Putin and Dmitry Medvedev…” directly taking away Putin’s power and handing it over to Medvedev. This weakness is the most crippling because it takes Putin’s presidential power away from him. This was a huge weakness in his model of electoral authoritarianism because it risks the chance that Medvedev, or future presidents, could gain elites support, keeping him out of