Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy During the Brezhnev Years

Can a theory of political competition, generalized from electoral politics, explain patterns of Soviet foreign policy? Contrasting competitive politics theory to earlier models of Kremlin infighting and institutionalized pluralism, Public Politics concludes that these older approaches neglected evidence of constituency building and logrolling by Politburo members during the Brezhnev era. Politburo members built constituencies among Soviet bureaucrats by identifying themselves publicly with symbols that appealed to bureaucrats; they kept these constituencies by insisting within the Politburo that Soviet foreign policy express the symbolism which they had used to gain bureaucratic support. The logrolls that resulted from mutual insistence on contrasting symbols explain why the Brezhnev leadership chose the self-contradictory policy known as "offensive detente": a global offensive against the West appealed to some bureaucrats in the Soviet Union, while detente appealed to others, and offensive detente provided a stable logroll.

The analysis of Soviet foreign policy in Public Politics in turn identifies a cause for the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Competitive politics subjected Soviet policy making to the same inefficiencies that plague policy making in an electoral society. Policies are inefficient for two reasons: (a) politicians build constituencies by symbolic appeals that supplant objective problems as the targets of policy and (b) successful competitors resolve their disagreements over policy by logrolling their respective policy proposals regardless of whether the resulting policies are mutually compatible in the real world. Substitution of symbolism for reality in policy-making combines with logrolling of mutually incompatible policies to inflict high costs on the citizenry of an electoral polity, but the polity persists despite the inefficiency of its policies because most citizens are partisans. Symbolism and logrolling sustain citizens' partisan loyalties to politicians in an electoral polity. Symbolism builds citizens' identification with politicians, while logrolls counteract the erosion of partisanship that would occur if if citizens did not see their partisan symbols expressed in official policy. Since citizens make their political decisions by considering their partisan identities and not the costs to society of their behaviors, they prefer symbolic action and logrolling to efficient policy making. By contrast to an electoral polity, in the USSR the vast majority of persons were not partisans of any political competitor. Soviet policies therefore did not express their identities, and people were consequently not loyal to Soviet politicians. When competitive pressures drove Gorbachev to turn to the people for support, they rejected him in favor of competitors with symbolic identities closer to their own, and because those competitors chose ethnic symbols, the Soviet Union split along ethnic lines.