Interim Publishing Report
Ilean Cashu
OSi, International Policy Fellowship Program
August 2001

This report covers mostly the published or soon-to-be published policy research articles during the past six months of the
fellowship cycle (January –June 2001). All the pieces connect directly to the public policy process and political economy of social policy reform (particularly pensions) – the principal foci of my research. As originally intended, I have translated some of my research articles into Russian tobe published in Moscow in early fall. A brief description of the articlesfollows.

1)    ‘A Political Institutional Analysis of the Pension Reform Process in Romania’, The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics, Volume 1, Number 1, May 2001, pp. 123-141.

The article analyzes the politics of the public pension reform process in Romania from an institutional perspective. It employs the concept  of ‘veto actor’ to explain the political dynamics of pension reform and divides the process into several stages to better capture the sequencing of policy changes. A veto actor is an individual or group of actors whose approval is necessary for a change in policy. The number of veto actors affects the radicalness of the pension reform (i.e., the size of the private pillar) as well as its speed. In the Romanian case, the fragmented party system (multiple veto actors) and proximity to elections (timing of reform) serve as primary explanations to the halted pension reform process.

2)    ‘The Pensioners’ Court Campaign: Making Law Matter in Russia’, forthcoming, Eastern European Constitutional Review, Fall 2001, with Mitchell Orenstein.

The article responds to the Fall 1999 Eastern European Constitutional Review (EECR) symposium on the lack of “demand for law” in Russia.  Building on Kathryn Hendley’s 1996 work, Trying to Make Law Matter: Legal Reform and Labor Law in the Soviet Union, this group of prominent scholars explored the reasons why legal constructivism seemed to have failed in Russia.  They emphasized several points, in Hendley’s case the inherited public cynicism toward law bred under Soviet rule, continuing favoratism towardthe well-connected, the low chances for normal citizens to receive redress,and the spectacular failure of public officials to obey their own laws.  Other scholars stressed other points, but all agreed, as Stephen Holmes wrote in his introduction, “Although the ‘supply’ of law in the Russian Federation has improved dramatically over the past eight years, ‘demand’ for law lags miserably behind.”
We do not have major theoretical differences with Hendley.  Indeed,we find the framework she develops intriguing, and we applaud her sociological approach to making legal institutions work.  But it must be recognized that Hendley’s field research, on which she bases her conclusions,was conducted in 1989-1990.  In her 1996 book, Hendley qualifies herconclusions by stating, “As of December 1991, little had changed withregard to [legal] accessibility. Legal institutions were becoming highlyaccessible, but this was largely irrelevant because people tended not totake advantage of it.”  As of December 1991.  But by 1999,at the time of the EECR symposium, things had changed radically.  Inthis article, we show that at that time, Russian pensioners were in the midstof a massive, national, and coordinated court campaign that sought to usethe Russian court system to protect their entitlements.  This campaignhad been building for some time, but reached its height in 1999, receivingsubstantial attention from the State Duma and forcing legislative changes. We also suggest that the pensioners’ court campaign is not an isolatedincident, nor one limited to the Russian Federation.  Instead, the availableevidence suggests that by the late 1990s, similar, and even larger, campaignswere evident in other areas of the law, and in other countries of the formerSoviet space.  We believe that the example of the pensioners’court campaign deserves scholarly attention and should cause us to changethe way we view the demand for law in Russia.  The conventional wisdomthat “demand for law is missing” in Russia is outdated. The demand for law in Russia is great; the problem is that there’sjust not enough in the shops.  And interestingly, demand for law inRussia is particularly strong among a segment of the population most imbuedwith the Soviet mentality, former Soviet pensioners.

3)    Rastuschiy Spros na Zaconnosti v Rossii: Sudebnaya Kompania Pensionerov (Boosting Demand for Law in Russia: The Pensioners’ Court Campaign), Forthcoming, Sotsialinyi Mir (Social World), September 2001, Moscow.

This is a substantially revised and much condensed version of the EECR article. It disproves the hypothesis about the low demand for the rule of law in Russia. The bulk of the evidence is based on the court cases filed by pensionersagainst the local agencies of social protection. In essence, pensioners demandedthe lawful estimation of their benefits consistent with the calculation pension law of February 1, 1998. The growing number of favorable rulings encouraged pensioners to sue the government for unduly reduced benefits. The legal activism of pensioners reached truly massive/national proportions, and hence, wasconceptualized as a court campaign. As the court campaign indicates, therecertainly is viable demand for law in Russia. In a situation where thereis a reasonable supply for law (effectively on books), the remaining conditionfor making law matter is having the state authorities abide by it.

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