Policymaking in Authoritarian Regimes: the Role of Ideas on Family Policy and Gender as the Non-Electoral Means of Regime Stability in Russia

This chapter examines political regimes though the lens of their policymaking processes. It concentrates on authoritarian regimes, analysing empirical evidence from contemporary Russia. In line with the sociological view of regimes that foregrounds the character of relations that exist between the rulers and the ruled (Cianetti et al. 2025), this chapter argues that while restricting political rights and the rule of law, authoritarian regimes feature an elaborate mechanism of policy development and implementation. This mechanism while preserving the power of authoritarian leadership, nonetheless, allows an input of diverse state and societal policy participants. Therefore, an intuitive view of top-down policymaking in authoritarian regimes needs to be complemented by the analysis of the bottom-up and horizontal influences that form its essential part. My chapter argues that such policy structures – in addition to policy outputs considered an important basis of social support in autocracies (Gerschewski 2013) – serve as a means for the regime to co-opt different societal groups. To zoom in on the policymaking processes in authoritarian regimes and given that policymaking in democratic and in authoritarian settings involves policy ideas (Khmelnitskaya 2015; 2021), my analysis considers policy ideas held by leaders, groups of bureaucratic and close to them expert actors and societal actors encouraged to participate in policymaking as a result of neoliberal administrative reforms. To analyse the role of ideas in authoritarian regimes, I apply insights of Vivien Schmidt’s (2008) discursive institutionalism used to examine ideas in policymaking in democracies, but also applicable to non-democracies (Dawson and Hanley 2019; Khmelnitskaya et al 2023). My analysis shows that political leaders articulate the broad guiding principles for different policy fields – e.g. family policy which is used as an example in this chapter – in their public addresses. The deliberate vagueness of the leadership’s statements legitimises contributions of other policy participants (groups of bureaucrats, experts and civil society) who hold a spectrum of often opposed ‘technical ideas’ which they seek to advance in policymaking. By permitting such diverse actors to achieve certain policy influence, an authoritarian regime finetunes policy and importantly co-opts different actors at the national and sub-national levels by allowing them to promote policy instruments they prefer, to make a difference to their own environments and/or to the lives of vulnerable communities. This engagement of actors’ ideas and emotions, on the one hand, demonstrates that contemporary autocracies have expanded into societal spaces hitherto unoccupied by the earlier pragmatic interest-based autocracies as examined by the scholars who emphasised the redistributive basis of authoritarianism (Linz 2000; Bueno di Mesquita et al 2012; Magaloni 2006). On the other hand, my argument shows that policy structures – in addition to policy outputs – serve as a non-electoral means of authoritarian regime stability, while the policymaking process per se even in the context of authoritarian institutions provides a mechanism for the ruled to influence policy of the political regime. I illustrate this argument with an example of family and gender policy in Russia since the early 2000s.