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63 World Pol. 581 (2011)
Formal Constitutions in Informal Politics: Institutions and Democratization in Post-Soviet Eurasia

handle is hein.journals/wpot63 and id is 648 raw text is: FORMAL CONSTITUTIONS IN INFORMAL POLITICS Institutions and Democratization in Post-Soviet Eurasia By HENRY E. HALE* H OW do formal institutions, rules that are officially and publicly codified by the state in written form, impact prospects for de- mocratization? Most answers focus on institutional design during the transition process, studying how constitutions and legal frameworks es- tablish rules of the game that guide behavior in ways facilitating demo- cratic stability, progress, or breakdown.2 At the same time, a growing body of work implicitly or explicitly calls this entire enterprise into question. The scholars, often area specialists with deep country knowl- edge, provide extensive evidence that formal institutions rarely operate as assumed.3 The literature on hybrid regimes-political systems com- bining authoritarian and democratic elements-is particularly eager to stress the ways in which actual behavior deviates from the democratic formal content of a country's constitution and body of law.4 What mat- ters instead is said to be informal politics, the real workings of politics, those unwritten and officially uncodified norms, habits, and practices *The author thanks Li Bennich-Bjorkman, Christofer Berglund, Charlotta Friedner-Parrat, Vsevolod Gunitskiy, Danielle Lussier, Israel Marques, Kelly McMann, Oxana Shevel, Oleksandr Fisun, the journal's anonymous reviewers, and participants in Columbia University's Comparative Politics Seminar, the Uppsala Forum at Uppsala University's Department of Government, and a work- shop of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia for helpful feedback on earlier drafts. 1 More specifically, informal institutions are socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are cre- ated, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels and formal institutions are rules and procedures that are created, communicated, and enforced through channels widely ac- cepted as official; Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 727. 2 Some classics in this voluminous literature include the exchange on constitutional design in the Journal of Democracy, republished in Diamond and Plattner 1996; Fish 2006; Linz and Stepan 1996; Shugart and Carey 2002; Skach 2005. E.g., Bratton and van de Walle 1994; O'Donnell 1994; Wilson 2005b. E.g., Carothers 2002; Magaloni 2006; Schedler 2002; Way 2005. WorldPolitics 63, no. 4 (October 2011), 581-617 Copyright ( 2011 Trustees of Princeton University doi: 10.1017/S0043887111000189

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