The post-Soviet presidency: temptation of social powers

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Author: Ivan Brikul’skiy

DOI: 10.21128/1812-7126-2023-6-66-89

Keywords: welfare state; president; post-Soviet research; presidentialism, separation of powers

Abstract

The author explores the constitutional and legal regimes of nine former Soviet republics, their constitutions, laws, presidential acts, and other instruments of influence on social policy, reaching the conclusion that heads of state directly determine the form and content of social policy. For example, presidents establish not only the general directions of social policy but also the specific amounts of social assistance, standards of social life, specific indicators, categories of citizens, and so on, and in some cases the amounts of scholarships, salaries, pensions, and pension supplements. Social policy is one of the ways to strengthen and concentrate presidential power when other power institutions are unable to oppose the president. With rare exceptions, the social powers of the presidents of the countries under consideration do not directly follow from their constitutions but are based on the special status of the head of state and his role in ensuring sovereignty, civil concord, and national security. To manage social policy, presidents may, in their discretion, use both direct instruments in their own name (e.g., acts, legislative initiative) and indirect instruments issued by other government bodies (e.g., instructions, recommendations, messages). The president’s toolkit is unlimited. The article notes that even parliamentary governance in some countries can serve as a screen for presidential management of social policy. As a result, presidential instruments of social policy can be used both to influence other branches of power, leading to an erosion of the system of separation of powers, and particularly parliamentarism, and to influence the population, which associates its social expectations with the president. The latter creates a paternalistic perception of the presidential institution as a distributor of social goods. In conditions where no power institution can oppose the appropriation of social powers by presidents, the natural limit of such powers is not the constitution and law, but the financial and economic capabilities of the State.

About the author: Ivan Brikul’skiy – Ph.D. Student, Department of Constitutional and Municipal Law, Faculty of Law, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Brikul’skiy I. (2023) Postsovetskoe prezidentstvo: iskushenie sotsial’nymi polnomochiyami [The post-Soviet presidency: temptation of social powers]. Sravnitel’noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 66–89. (In Russian).

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