Models of Russian Parliamentarism

This article is based on a hypothesis that so far a unified tradition of parliamentarism perception has not been definitively formed in Russia, as well as a unified pattern of the interaction of the people’s representative body with the executive authorities. The splitting of the existing model into at least three different smaller models can be viewed as a result of the contemporary political history of Russia with the mostly unsuccessful attempts to carry out a constitutional reform. The author examines some of the key events of the last stage of this reform. The focus of the article is on the evolution of the form of government in Russian Federation from 1990. The author examines the amendments to the Constitution of the Soviet Union of 1977 and the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of 1978, while also analyzing the conditions in which the constitutional crisis of 1993 emerged. The results of the reform are assessed from the point of view of the legal status of the representative body. The author tries to demonstrate the constitutional grounds for the “weakness” in the position of the Parliament according to the 1993 Constitution of Russian Federation. The author also reviews the legislative practice of the two last decades, in particular the case-law on the assigning and removing from the position of the Head of the Government of the Russian Federation, the changes in the legislation on the Accounts Chamber and on the parliamentary investigations. Special attention in this article is paid to certain historical analogies: according to the author of this paper, “the Monarchy of the 3d of June”, – the political regime that existed approximately from the end of 1907 and until the beginning of 1915, – can be viewed as a prototype for the modern pattern of interaction between the executive authorities and the Parliament. The possibility of supplementing the constitutional law with a number of more efficient institutions of parliamentary control is also examined in the paper, namely the institution of interpellation, the return of the previous algorithm of formation of the Accounts Chamber which prevented the executive authorities from influencing the process, and the right of the majority in the Parliament to offer up a candidate for the position of the Head of the Government.

About the author: Ilya Shablinsky – Doctor of Sciences in Law, Professor, Faculty of Law, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Shablinsky I. (2019) Modeli rossiyskogo parlamentarizma [Models of Russian Parliamenntarism]. Sravnitel'noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol.28, no.5, pp.15–33. (In Russian).

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