Personalist Leadership in Russia

Leaders in personalist regimes like Russia are continually faced with the need to ensure that their position is not challenged by other members of the ruling group. Historically, personalist leaders have responded to this situation by implementing a series of authority-building strategies. This paper identifies nine such strategies – institutional control, symbolic authority-building, alliance-making, factional development, transactional dynamics, mobilisation, policy, personal performance, and threat – and shows how these strategies have been used by Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin