On The Russian Political Party System From The Perspective Of Democratization

Russian political reform aims to imitate the Western mood to establish the multi-party political system, the parliament democracy, the separation and balance of power system, and the freedom election. A mature modern political party system is essential to the growth and consolidation of democracy.Generally speaking, the pursuing of Russian multi-party system is the results of different complicated function of factors. The profound factor is the high centralization of state power by Soviet Communist Party which has serious drawback. And Gorbachev's reform for openness and democratization which gained people's support becomes the realistic impetus factors. The Russian multi-party system has experienced three developing stages, sprouting stage, forming with preliminary development stage, and legalizing and standardized operation stage. Each stage has different content and characteristics. It reflects different understanding and thinking of several leaders about Russian political party system. It also reflects the establishment and perfection of relevant legal systems. Speaking of the present condition, on the basis of basic principle and frame of the constitution of 1993, the relatively stable multi-party pattern starts to appear in Russia. In this pattern, the principle political parties have occupied the leadership, the development level of political parties is low, political parties are marginalized in country's political life. Meanwhile, it displays "regime party", which is sole possession of the characteristic. All these present the immature and poor efficiency of the political party system. There are four main reasons as followed: the political party system lacks a firm social base, it limited by extant constitutional government system, it influenced by the hindrance of the traditional political culture of the autocratic state power centralization, and there are drawbacks in the electoral system. Therefore, there are five respects on how to establish an efficient political party system during the transformation period as followed: making the nation and society steady and safe, developing the modern democratic political culture, cultivating a mature citizen's society, ensuring the legal and essential status of the political party in the national political life, and enhancing the self-building of political parties.All in all, the future development trend of Russian political party system will be as followed: the current steady multi-party pattern will extend, the political parties will separate and unite further, the tendency of political party polarization will be obvious, the political party system will be more standardized. But there is still a long way to go to establish a mature and effective modern political party system.