Brian AitchisonMRes, PhD, Political Science |
Scholarship
My
PhD work focused on the significance of small business associations in
influencing regional and municipal politics in Russia. Stemming from a critique
of state capture and collective action theories, it departed from mainstream
academic discourse on Russia's politico-economic development, which tends to
treat relationships at the highest levels (e.g. amongst resource industries and
the president) as representative of the whole. It examined the role of the small
business community in building Russia's legal and political infrastructures from
the grassroots level. Small business associations had become increasingly
influential under Putin and Medvedev; the development of the community has been
a cornerstone of their modernization program. The success of small businesses'
collective action has resulted in increased participation in the representative
institutions created to accommodate it. Small business associations have become
key allies in the fight against corruption and the deconstruction of the
ubiquitous Russian bureaucracy. Traditional understandings of 'capture' theories
appear to break down at the small business level: one small business is too
small to 'capture' a state office, and commensurately it is too small to draw
the attention of an increasingly powerful state seeking to 'capture' strategic
enterprises. Small businesses' collective efforts to gain political influence
thus carry much less nefarious implications when compared with those
of larger enterprises, as they necessarily involve bargaining, discussion, and
compromise among a broad range of actors. In this sense they are key (and
understudied) players in Russia's political, economic, and social development
I employed a mixed method approach in this work. Comparative historical
analysis of small business lobbies in different contexts was combined with a
quantitative analysis examining a potential causal relationship between small
businesses' contribution to a locality's GDP and its democracy score. This work
complemented data obtained through field interviews and a focus group conducted in Saratov,
Russia with local political and business leaders under the auspices of the Volga
Regional Academy of Civil Service (Povolzhskaya Akademiya Gosudarstvennoi
Sluzhby). Ultimately, the aim of the research was to examine
small business groups' potential as democratic- and market-institution builders,
and to reconcile that potential with the Russian executives' national
development objectives.