“You want a great upheaval, we want a great Russia”
Peter Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia
Address to the Second Duma, May 10, 1907
Abstract
Efficient constitutional change depends on ability of bargaining parties to overcome such inherent problems of political change as commitment and credibility (Galiani et al. in J Econ Behav Organ 103:17–38, 2014; Congleton in Perfecting parliament: constitutional reform, liberalism, and the rise of western democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011; Boettke and Coyne in J Inst Econ 5(1):1–23, 2009). This paper studies how constitutional bargaining leads to a negative sum-game in a transitional illiberal environment. We use a historical example of the Russian constitutional monarchy (1905–1917) to demonstrate that an exchange-based constitutional change within the king-council model leads to an inefficient outcome when bargaining parties fail to trade political authority for policy results. The historical example of the Russian constitutional monarchy shows how both radicalization of the liberal parliamentary majority and pseudo-constitutionalism of Nicholas II undermined efficiency of the legislative assembly. We also find that nationality-based politics undermined the constitutional bargaining by radicalizing both the liberal movement and the tsar.
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Notes
Immanuel Kant’s 1793 essay “On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right (Against Hobbes)” and Von Humboldt’s 1851 Limits of State Action (written in 1790s) are examples of a broad range of German liberalism. Von Humboldt (1851) provided the Lockean narrative of liberty to present a critique of Kant and argued that a main role of the state was to promote liberty, human development, and happiness (Congleton 2011: 458–459).
Pipes (1974: 305–309) argues that Russia became a de-facto police state after the Decree of August 14, 1881 that instituted martial law and expanded authority of the Ministry of Interior.
The Western Provinces consisted of nine provinces stretching from the south-west of present-day Ukraine to the north-east of present-day Belarus and included such cities as Kyiv, Minsk, Vilnius, Kaunas, Belostok, Grodno, and Brest-Litovsk.
Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws was similar to Article 63 of the 1848 Constitution of Germany. Scholars of the Russian history debate whether the tsar had a constitutional right to prorogue the Duma or not (see Ascher 1992, 1988; Pipes 1990). On the one hand, the Fundamental Laws guaranteed independence of the legislative assembly. On the other hand, Nicholas II did not take an oath to the Fundamental Laws and thus the monarch’s power remained superior to the constitution.
The Provisional Government that was formed in March 1917 established a legislative assembly. After the October Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks took the control of the Russian government. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks took part in the parliamentary elections. After losing the majority to the Socialist Revolutionaries, Lenin dissolved the assembly in January 1918.
The Duma replaced the so-called Bulygin Duma, a powerless consultative assembly based on the principle of representation, established by the Decree of February 18, 1905 and chaired by Alexander Bulygin (1851–1919), the Minister of Interior (Pipes 1990: 29–34).
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We thank Roger Congleton and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Krasnozhon, L., Bunyk, M. Liberalism and great upheaval: What did classical liberals do in the Tsarist Russia?. Const Polit Econ 30, 96–113 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-019-09273-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-019-09273-7