Eighteenth-century levels of corruption were, if I remember my lessons about rotten boroughs from twenty years ago correctly, dodgy means applied by particular people to get themselves into office. Russia is a country-wide party-list system (it used to be a half-and-half system, with some number of the seats picked from regional lists, but Putin changed that roughly at the time he started appointing regional governors), so you're getting a very top-down application of Party power to the aim of the re-election of the Party.
Which happens everywhere to some slight degree, but at least in principle in England you have employment tribunals which strongly discourage your boss from explicitly sacking you because you voted incorrectly, election-watching organisations with some degree of both power and independence, and a media such that at least one newspaper will gleefully report corruption benefiting the party it doesn't support. As far as I can tell from the reporting, none of these exist in contemporary Russia.
Institutions, it turns out, matter.
Oil is down 10% from its speculated heights of last month, but Chinese and Indian demand is unlikely to diminish in the medium term, and the geological impression seems to be that enormous new oil-fields are not particularly likely to be found in any term.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 05:35 pm (UTC)Which happens everywhere to some slight degree, but at least in principle in England you have employment tribunals which strongly discourage your boss from explicitly sacking you because you voted incorrectly, election-watching organisations with some degree of both power and independence, and a media such that at least one newspaper will gleefully report corruption benefiting the party it doesn't support. As far as I can tell from the reporting, none of these exist in contemporary Russia.
Institutions, it turns out, matter.
Oil is down 10% from its speculated heights of last month, but Chinese and Indian demand is unlikely to diminish in the medium term, and the geological impression seems to be that enormous new oil-fields are not particularly likely to be found in any term.