”Vedomosti”: “Rules of the game: the practitioners’ theory”

Because serious discussion of politics and economics is comparatively new in this country, we tend to overestimate the opinion of practitioners. Politicians and business people have recently defended rafts of doctoral dissertations: this is of course absurd, and one can safely leave these dissertations unread. A professional politician or a businessman has as much chance of producing a meaningful research paper as a scientist to make millions trading on the stock exchange in the after hours or to become the country's president without leaving his study. However, outside the scholarly world, things are more complicated: we often trust the words of practitioners even when they do not know whereof they speak.

Take Prime Minister Putin's phone-in programme on December 3. It looks as if he seriously believes that there is no connection between the destroyed electoral system (the 2007 elections were no elections) and the disastrous failure of economic policy in 2009. He speaks about reforms of healthcare or education without being aware of the scale of what he is talking about (even one such reform could be a worthy task of a full presidential term) or the fact that the consequences of reform depend not only on the quality of the law and the amount of money allocated. For a project to become law in reality, and not just formally, it needs to be approved by parliament, and what is more, a representative parliament elected through political competition.

This is not about the legitimacy of the law (or a series of laws if we are talking about reform) although legitimacy of course is important. For the law to be fulfilled it is necessary that it be approved by the citizens, those who are to fulfill it in day-to-day life. When parliament votes for or against and when the government thinks about what parliament votes "for" and "against," good versions of laws are sifted off from bad versions of the same laws. Still earlier, during the election campaign, competition forces politicians to tailor their programmes to the tastes of their voters, which is really the whole point of elections. It is at such moments that the future leader consolidates popular support. The process is more about adjusting the programme than about agitation for the programme. In his live phone-in Putin effectively cancelled the 2012 elections, unaware that in this way he announced that the very reforms he has just been describing are impossible.

That Putin is not a specialist on political theory does not prevent him from being an outstanding practitioner (no irony there). He has been at the top for more than ten years: this makes him the third longest-serving leader of Russia in the last 100 years. It would be very interesting to understand how he manages to bring it off - both theoretically and as an example for future leaders. But so far we are too keen to hear what he says.

Konstantin Sonin is a professor at the Kellog Management School, North-Western University, USA and the Russian School of Economics