Authoritarian constitutionalism in Putin’s Russia: A pragmatic constitutional court in a dual state
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the successful adaptation of the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC) to an increasingly authoritarian regime under President Vladimir Putin. It argues that the key to its success lay in its pragmatic approach, whereby the Court decides cases that matter to the regime in a politically expedient way, while giving priority to legal and constitutional considerations in other cases, thereby recognizing the reality of a dual state. Over the years the RCC has taken a pragmatic approach in its reaction to changes in the rules of its operations, in its personnel, and in the policies of the popular political leader, including reducing the country’s subordination of European legal norms. In so doing, the Court and its skillful chairman Valerii Zorkin achieved considerable autonomy in pursuing its own legal vision on many issues and even improved the implementation of its decisions by other judges and political bodies alike (previously a big problem). In short, the RCC developed its own version of “authoritarian constitutionalism”, which may serve as a model for constitutional judicial bodies in other authoritarian states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".