This paper explores the link between the public policy and the survival strategies of a hybrid political regime. Using the case of higher education in Russia, I show how the Russian state elites use the policy tools widespread in Western democracies to achieve domestic political goals. Introduction of quasi-market mechanisms...
The central thesis of the paper is that authoritarian cases have systematically been excluded from welfare state theories despite the existing empirical research on authoritarian welfare provisions. This theoretical gap has limited the instruments available for comparative welfare state research. As a result, such research has attended to the democratic...