Jerry F. Hough is the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University.  His two most recent books are The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (2001) and Changing Party Coalitions: The Strange Red State-Blue State Alignment (2006).

Question: After some long years of studying first the Soviet political system, and then the Russian system, you have changed your focus to the American system. Why did you decide to do this?

Hough: I’m interested in the questions: How do you form markets?  How do you form states?  How do you form democracies?  Obviously, historians can write about the lessons of Russia in 50 years, but it’s too early to do that now.  I’ve chosen to look at the United States primarily from a historical perspective because by and large we’ve had taboos on the discussion of American development.  I decided that if I go back and look at the problems of English and American evolution more seriously, this may illuminate the general process.  Indeed I’m doing a book that compares the evolution of England and the United States with that of Spain and Mexico; I retain the same questions with which I began.  I entered Soviet studies in the 1950s and was influenced by people like Barrington Moore, Alexander Gerschenkron, and the like, who were asking the question: would the economic transformation of Russia that was occurring in the mid-century eventually lead to political changes?  So in that sense, I haven’t changed my focus. 

Question: Has your work on the Soviet Union given you unique insight on the study of American political science and history?

Hough: Yes.  I think the major problem in the study of American politics by political scientists, and American society by sociologists, or American history by historians, is that they look only at this country and they have no comparative perspective.  That leads to very serious problems for they never try to explain what they take for granted and that did not occur.  A knowledge of other countries such as Russia helps to illuminate that.

I’m looking not simply at the United States but also the England out of which it came.  If we understood Europe, we would not have made the mistakes we did in Russia and Iraq. We forget that Henry VIII consolidated the English state in the 1530s and 1540s, and England then had 150 years of religious war, which allegedly in 1688 produced parliamentary supremacy.  Parliamentary supremacy was not really introduced until 1832 in the Reform Act, and then universal suffrage was not established until the 1880s.

We have no sense of what that means in terms of time: that’s 350 years.  If Iraq is on the “civilized” English path, it will reach full democracy in 2350.  Instead, when we went into Russia and later repeated the same mistakes in Iraq, we assumed that you can create a market democracy in a matter of 2, 3, 4, or 5 years.  It takes decades, even if you say that Russia began its democratization with the zemstvos back in the 1860s and 1870s, when it actually did.  In other words, Russia is far more advanced on the democratic path than Iraq is, but still it’s been only 150 years since the zemstvos.  Russia has a way to go.

Question: The United States has been at it for a while…

Hough: Particularly if you assume that we began with the Magna Carta in the 13th century or with the creation of English state in the 14th and 15th centuries.  The English experience prior to 1776 was of course also the American experience.

Question: How would you assess where the United States and Russia are today in terms of their democratic progress?

Hough: The notion that somehow a market mechanism comes down from Zeus and functions automatically if you destroy the state was the assumption that was adopted in Russia and then adopted in Iraq.  It is just silly.  We’ve had a fairly decent market economy for a couple of centuries in the United States, and look at the monumental mess we currently face.  The state did not properly regulate the mortgage industry and the banking industry.  It’s a constant process because of an inherent problem in the neoclassical economic model. 

I do not think that what happened in Russia was the result of the Communist legacy.  The actual Communist legacy was an authoritarian state, with an emphasis on growth and on capital investment.  Chinese policy is what you would expect from the Communist legacy.  It is what I expected in Russia in the 1980s.  China has had superb economic growth.  

What you see in Russia is the result of the logic of the neoclassical economic model.  The neoclassical definition of individual rationality says that people should steal.  Government should control that.  Yet, the model implies, as the philosopher John Locke said, that government officials “are but men.”  Hence they should be trying to maximize profit, which is what they are doing in Russia.  The real problem is how to translate the raw individual self-interest seen in Russia for nearly two decades, and to a considerable extent in the United States in the last ten years, into a more semi-civilized form of society? 

This is an inherent problem because government officials, who are needed to protect property rights and to create and regulate a market, also have the self-interest to be corrupt.  That’s what the neoclassical economic model says, so how do you create a system that brings that under control?  It’s obviously extremely difficult and this takes generations.

Question: Is there a model democratic system in your view today which more or less has these issues under control?

Hough: I think, in general, that Western Europe has done a better job than the United States.  The European system, and by that I include the ones you see in Australia and Canada, is a system in which, if a majority wants something like health care, then the majority can get it.  The United States government has been deliberately set up as a set of vetoes.  Twenty one states can veto any congressional act, and the 21 most rural states have less than a quarter of the population…  

Question: In studying the American democratic system, is your ultimate goal then to apply what you have learned to Russia? 

Hough: If my image of marketization and democratization is right, then I’m not going to live long enough to see the real democratization of Russia.  I’m over 70, and it’s going to take decades.  It may well be that Russia is on a shortened model of Mexico.  Mexico established its dominant party system in the 1920s and 1930s, and it began breaking up in the 1990s.  Since [the Russian democratic tradition] goes back to the zemstvo, and Russia has the experience of the Duma prior to 1917 and also of the highly-participatory system of the Communists, it will probably begin to make this transition once Putin passes from the scene.  If he lives as long as Tito, that’s a long time. If his plane crashes, that may be different.  There are accidents in history.

IMF policy is the policy of the US Treasury Department, and the crucial thing that really annoyed me about American policy in Russia is that democracy was defined as giving power to people whom they called democrats, but who were for an economic policy that was only wanted by 15 percent of the population.  Then an authoritarian state was established under Yeltsin and Putin to try to force through a kind of economic system and social welfare system that we would never accept in the United States.  If you look at what’s happening in the United States, the population is not asking for a pure market: everybody is demanding more regulation, more social security, improvement of health care.  American advice to Russia has never conveyed the sense that the ethos of democracy is to try to have an economic policy that the majority of the population wants. 

Putin has consolidated his power.  He may be in power for decades, and maybe he’ll start to look at manufacturing, the development of a service economy, and the creation of a Western Europe health system.  Let us hope.

Question: What would be needed for democratization to move forward in Russia?  What are the necessary preconditions?

Hough: In the first place, there is no such thing as pure democracy.  The United States began with a semi-democratic system.  We democratized in the 1820s and 1830s and that produced a civil war.  We reduced the level of democracy after the civil war, and then Franklin Roosevelt introduced greater democracy.  I think again we have slid back.  In other words, there is no one such thing as democracy.

Clearly, what has to occur in Russia is a sense on the part of elite, including the intelligentsia, of the need for responsiveness to a broad mass of the population--those whom intellectuals have always scorned as “the black people.”   

To me, there have been two great crimes in post-1991 Russia: one is allowing probably over 10 million people to die prematurely because the government, with IMF approval, decided not to fund a health system, develop industry and agriculture, and maintain a healthy and nutritious diet.  Average male life expectancy was already too low when it was 65, 66, 67 in the mid 1980s, but to let it drop to 57 for years and years will go down in history, like Stalin’s collectivization or Stalin’s purges, as one of the great tragedies of Russian history. 

The other crime is that Russia had one of the most technically-trained elites and technically-trained working classes in the world, but the government, with IMF pressure, destroyed it.  They deliberately destroyed investment in manufacturing.  It was said that Russia didn’t have the technical competence to export to the West.  Meanwhile, China, which was decades behind Russia, suddenly became one of the great exporting powers in the world.  It is precisely when countries are at middle or lower stages in their economic development that they are able to adjust exchange rates and compete in the world economy.

What is needed in Russia is the creation of a civil society.  That is not just the creation of intelligentsia environmental and women’s group, but trade union, manufacturing organizations, professional organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, real parties.   The organizations in civil society have to be strong enough to counterbalance the oil industry and the government.  

The Communist Party symbolizes the problem.  Zyuganov was a bad candidate in 1991.  Even if one approved his policy, he was a non-charismatic candidate.  What’s he still doing around?  Obviously, the Communist party has simply been bought off.  It’s totally corrupted by the regime, or it would nominate a younger, more charismatic, more moderate kind of leader, or it would be replaced by a social democratic party. What needs to occur is the diffusion of income and power through an emphasis on manufacturing and on the service sector.  That’s also the way in which a civil society is created.

The great strength of the United States is that the intelligentsia called themselves, most businessmen, workers, and farmers “the middle class.”  This was a myth, but it meant they were offering these people an alliance rather than helping to destroy the forces that were needed to limit government as Russian intelligentsia have done since the 19th century.  Russians need to have a sense of time and focus on what is the doable and not the ideal.

Question: In the past, many people had talked about the inefficiency and un-sustainability of the Soviet system, and now, people are saying the same thing about the current Russian regime.  What about the sustainability and the efficiency of the two-party system that we see in the United States today?

Hough: I personally think the current Russian regime is quite sustainable for years and that the intelligentsia should not be absorbed with dreams.  The American future depends to a considerable extent on what happens in the current crisis.  I think Obama’s going to win, and I think that Obama is associating himself with people who will make real change.

The real problem of the American political system has been the Democratic Party and its decision to appeal to what it defines as the middle class -- the professionals with a family income of $115,000-$125,000 of the population, or the top 10 percent, the rich.  Since the real middle class has been no real economic choice at the poll, it has had to vote on issues like gay rights, gay marriage, or abortion.  I think this economic crisis will push the Democratic Party to nominate Obama, who will do what is supposed to happen in a democracy: appeal to people who are in the middle, who are making $60,000-$70,000 dollars a year.  A decent democratic system makes a lot of errors, but it is supposed to be self-correcting.

Of course, if the Democratic Party doesn’t respond, or the Republican Party doesn’t move back to the center where Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were, then another party will move in, but it is likely to be again a two-party system, but with different parties. 

Question: If we were to flash forward 20 years, assuming current processes continue, what can we expect to see in the political systems of Russia and the United States? 

Hough: Obviously that’s a difficult question to answer.  I am of the school that believes that the world is about to encounter economic difficulties, if not as severe as the 1930s, then nearly as severe and that’s going to have political effects around the world.  We’re going to have to see if some terrorist gets an atomic bomb and blows up Paris, or London, or New York and how people respond to that.  I do think the United States is getting ready to return to the New Deal and to a more of a European-type of democracy, and I think that’s a good thing.

I assume that Russia really has a modified form of the old Communist system, where the General Secretary has the real power, but a General Secretary like Stalin was very different from a General Secretary like Brezhnev and even more from one like Gomulka in Poland and Kadar in Hungary.  I hope that Putin starts looking towards the future and his legacy.  

Certainly a new set of oligarchs who spend all their time stealing the property of their predecessors does the average Russian no good.  People should focus on building controls and constraints on the oligarchs.

As a new generation starts rising to replace the generation that came up in the 1980s and 1990s, I think that Russia will have the kind of evolution that one has seen in the East Asian Tigers such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore and that it will develop a much more moderate and much more balanced political system.  But those are the models that Russian intelligentsia need to study as they start to build political alliances with less than perfect allies.  That is how a powerful civil society is developed.