Extraction and Democracy
The following article was willingly sent by Georgi M. Derlugian, the professor of Northwestern University, Department of Sociology for what we would like to thank him heartily.
You might not have noticed that the authoritarian Louis XIV indirectly opened a path toward democratization, and that the authoritarian Vladimir Putin might likewise be opening a path toward democratization. It will take some unpacking to show you the parallels between the two visibly vindictive autocrats, and even more to identify their possible long-run contributions to democracy. But at least the unpacking will reveal some promising ways of thinking about taxation, fiscal sociology, and state extraction more generally.
Recovering from the near-disintegration of France during the Fronde of 1648-1653 and assuming personal power in 1661 with the indispensable backing of Jean Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV spent half a century building up the French state’s central capacity. Building on the administrative innovations of earlier chief ministers Richelieu and Mazarin, he replaced largely autonomous regional governors with intendants who served at the king’s pleasure. He battered, shrank, and subdued the large enclaves of Protestant power that had survived 16th century wars of religion. He incorporated the once fractious French nobility into the rituals of his opulent court. He put down rebellions against state intervention – including fiscal intervention – so ferociously that they almost disappeared after having torn the country apart repeatedly before 1653. Although instead of simply stepping up the level of taxation he and Colbert widely adopted such expedients as forced loans and sales of offices, Louis XIV built a fiscal system that delivered revenues to support international wars of unprecedented cost and intensity.
Political regimes vary in many dimensions: size, wealth, geopolitical position, formal structure, and much more. For our understanding of the sorts of political transformations initiated by Louis XIV and Vladimir Putin, it helps to begin with two fundamental dimensions: state capacity and democracy. State capacity means the extent to which interventions of state agents in existing non-state resources, activities, and interpersonal connections alter existing distributions of those resources, activities, and interpersonal connections as well as relations among those distributions. (State-directed redistribution of wealth, for example, almost inevitably involves not only a redistribution of resources across the population but also a change in the connection between the geographic distributions of wealth and population.) In a high-capacity regime, by this standard, whenever state agents act their actions affect citizens’ resources, activities, and interpersonal connections significantly. In a low-capacity regime, state agents have much narrower impacts no matter how hard they try to change things. Louis XIV built up French state capacity from the pitiful levels of the mid-17th century to the might that awed all of Europe by Louis’ death in 1715.
What of democracy? In 1661, to be sure, French people experienced nothing like democracy at anything larger than a local scale. Let us think of democracy as the extent to which the people subject to a given state’s authority exercise broad, equal, binding, and protected voice when it comes to state performance. If popular voice becomes broader, more equal, more binding on state performance, and better protected against arbitrary action by state agents, democratization is occurring. De-democratization, in these terms, involves narrowing, rising inequality, decreased binding of state action by popular voice, and/or declining protection of that popular voice against state agents’ arbitrary action. By these standards, Louis XIV wrought a substantial de-democratization of the French regime while enormously increasing his state’s capacity. Visualizing a two-dimensional space with low-capacity non-democracy in the lower left-hand corner and high capacity democracy in the upper right-hand corner, we can trace Louis’ trajectory upward on the capacity axis and backward on the democracy axis, thus producing a net movement into the quadrant of high capacity non-democracy.
How, then, might we imagine Louis XIV as opening a path toward democracy? Isn’t the claim a contradiction in terms? Once we distinguish between short-run and long-run transformations of regimes, not necessarily. I will elaborate the distinction and my argument in a few moments. But for now, let me call your attention to four features of the Louis XIV story: 1) the buildup of central state power, 2) the state’s increasing priority of access to state-sustaining resources such as taxes, labor power, and military means, 3) reduced scope and strength for competing centers of autonomous coercive power, and 4) increasing dependence of support for state activities on citizen compliance, however grudging and coerced.
How do the four features matter for the eventual development of democracy? In the long run, no regime can sustain relatively broad, equal, binding, and protected popular voice without substantial central capacity. That capacity implies priority in access to state-sustaining resources. Existence of competing centers that exercise autonomous coercive power such as private armies and great landed estates inhibits any such enforcement of democratic decision-making. And reliance of the state’s routine activities on citizen compliance (rather than, say, external sponsorship or state monopolies of precious goods) entails incessant bargaining (however asymmetrical) over the means of state activity in the short run. It also entails at least the possibility of organized resistance in the long run.
Do you begin to see why authoritarian Vladimir Putin might, despite himself, open a longer-term path to Russian democracy? Remember the background of Putin’s rise to power. Russia once lived a vital, vigorous moment of democratic hope. Aspirations rose impressively in 1988. At that point, to be sure, the Russian Republic still dominated the Soviet Union rather than existing as an independent state. Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the USSR’s Communist Party and (since that year) chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s presidium, was then leading the drive toward glasnost’ (political openness) and perestroika (economic and political rebuilding). During the historic 19th party conference that opened at the end of June 1988, Gorbachev delivered an intensely hopeful three-and-one-half hour address.
The sober Annual Register summarized Gorbachev’s speech as rejecting Stalinism, and calling for a new society that would preserve the benefits of socialism:
Although it was impossible to describe such a society in a detailed way, a socialism of this kind would be a system of ‘true things.’ The purpose of all social development, from the economy to spiritual life, would be the satisfaction of popular needs. There would be a dynamic and advanced economy based upon a variety of forms of property and worker participation, combining a broad measure of central planning with a great degree of autonomy for individual enterprises. The basic needs of all would be provided, including health, education and housing, but individual talent would also be rewarded, where appropriate, in both moral and material terms. A society of this kind would have a high degree of culture and morality, and would be managed by a system of ‘profound and consistent democracy’ (AR USSR 1988: 106).
Gorbachev claimed to be setting the Soviet Union, including his own Russia, on the path to democratization. The Annual Register’s reporter noted, however, that economic performance was declining in the USSR, and that widespread demands for autonomy or even independence were arising among the Union’s non-Russian nationalities. Despite Gorbachev’s promotion of openness and rebuilding, no smooth transition to democracy had begun at a national scale.
Nine years later, in 1997, the Soviet Union had splintered, and Russia had gone through fierce struggles for political control. Playing Russian nationalism against Gorbachev’s effort to preserve what remained of the Union, Russian party leader Boris Yeltsin had seized power in 1991. In 1993, Yeltsin had consolidated his grip by putting down a right-wing parliamentary coup. Yeltsin had then won the presidential election in 1996, but by 1997 his health was already faltering, a fact that caused feverish maneuvering for influence within the presidential circle. The Register then broadcast little good news about the domestic political situation:
Continuing into 1997, the struggle was conducted between the country’s major financial-industrial groups, embracing the largest banks, key sectors of the economy and the newspapers and television stations in which they had acquired a controlling interest. The wider political situation was one of relative stability, apart from a far-reaching government reshuffle in the spring; but this was set against a background of continuing economic decline and widening social differences, accompanied by an increase in organized crime and corruption (AR Russia 1997: 135-136).
At that point, nearly autonomous economic oligarchs were profiting from their seizure of former state assets, private security forces (many drawn from former state security services and disbanded military units) were consolidating control over protection, and ordinary Russians were clinging to whatever shreds of the socialist safety net remained (Fish 2005, Ledeneva 1998, Varese 2001, Volkov 2002).
By this time, Russia’s fledgling democracy had fallen on hard times.
An enfeebled Yeltsin resigned the presidency at the end of 1999, opening the path to his prime minister, Vladimir Putin. A career intelligence officer who had headed the Federal Security Bureau (the KGB’s post-communist successor), Putin spent no effort promoting democracy. During his victorious electoral campaign of 2000, he even refused to debate his rival candidates. But his public statements stressed the necessity of restoring a strong state and a properly functioning market. He also promised strong action against the “Islamic fundamentalists” he portrayed as threatening Chechnya and other sections of the Caucasus. Soon after taking office, he reduced the powers of regional governors, started restraining the mass media, and undertook a broad effort to tame the country’s “oligarchs” – the capitalists in business and media who had made billions and acquired enormous autonomy during the 1990s. Putin emphasized state capacity at the expense of democracy (Fish 2005).
Reinforcement of central control continued. As the Annual Register of 2004 put it:
Russia ended the year on a trajectory towards a more authoritarian state, and it seemed unlikely – despite the hopes of the liberal groups that had largely been sidelined in Russian politics – that the country would repeat the experience of its neighbor Ukraine and see the political establishment give way before a popular revolution. Developments in Russia in 2004 were dominated by two factors: the government’s response to the terrorist reprisals carried out by Chechen separatists beyond the borders of the republic, most horrifically in September against children in the school of Beslan in North Ossetia; and the government’s campaign against the “oligarchs” to regain control over energy interests, epitomized by the Yukos saga. The campaigns against Chechnya and against the oligarchs generally won popular approval (AR Russia 2004: 105).
Consider the Putin government’s arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodokorsky, head of Yukos, the country’s largest privatized energy company. It exemplified Putin’s relentless campaign to recapture control over oil and gas supplies as a means of consolidating his personal political power and eliminating wildcat capitalist “oligarchs” from his possible political opposition. Soon the state-controlled energy corporation became the world’s largest producer of natural gas. With nearly a quarter of the world’s known natural gas reserves, Putin’s Russia is using its energy to buttress its international influence. As of 2006, Slovakia was importing 100% of its gas from Russia, Bulgaria 94%, Lithuania 84%, Hungary 80%, Austria 74%, Germany 40%, Italy 30%, and France 25% (Schmitt 2006: 61). Clearly, the state’s monopolization of energy supplies was lending it tremendous clout both domestically and internationally.
Russian citizens felt the domestic clout. In 2004, Putin’s government extended its surveillance of media as it began prosecuting both academics and businessmen who showed signs of mounting political opposition or embarrassing state authorities. In April 2004, for example, the Moscow City Court sentenced 41-year-old Moscow researcher Igor Sutyagin to 15 years in prison for high treason and espionage. During the later 1990s, Sutyagin had helped run a Canadian-sponsored research project on civilian-military relations in twelve post-Soviet and post-Warsaw Pact countries, including Russia. Putyagin had no access to military or intelligence secrets. Working from Moscow’s Institute of USA and Canada Studies (once a major center of planning for glasnost’ and perestroika), Sutyagin organized interviews with leaders across twelve countries using a standardized survey instrument. The court convicted him – unjustly, by all external accounts -- of passing state secrets to British and U.S. intelligence.
In 2005, the Putin government passed a series of state-strengthening laws. The new laws abolished direct election of governors, ended single constituency voting in parliamentary elections, tightened requirements for registration of political parties, and raised the threshold for party representation in parliament. The government also began considering laws to restrict radically the autonomy of non-governmental organizations. Human rights organizations working in the Caucasus found themselves under extreme pressure, with the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society the object of criminal cases for inciting racial hatred and violating tax laws (Human Rights Watch 2006: 3). In terms of breadth, equality, protection, and binding voice, Putin’s regime was visibly de-democratizing Russia.
Russia moved toward democratic territory after 1985 while losing substantial state capacity, then began reversing its direction in both regards. Each year New York based Freedom House uses an elaborate questionnaire to rate every independent regime in the world on political rights and civil liberties, with scores on each running from 1 (best) to 7 (worst). In 1991-1992 Freedom House placed Russia at 3 each on political rights and civil liberties – certainly not democratic by Freedom House standards or ours, but far above the regime’s 6 and 5 for political rights and civil liberties in 2005 (Freedom House 2006). A fixed 2004 presidential election in which Putin received 71.4 of the vote to 13.7 percent for his nearest competitor removed even openly contested elections from Russia’s claims for recognition as a democracy. Responding to Russia’s snuffing out of opposition voices, for 2005 Freedom House shifted the regime’s overall classification from Partly Free to Not Free.
Freedom House’s ratings catch Russia’s de-democratization, but miss the arc of state capacity: from high in the period before the Gorbachev reforms to declining during the Yeltsin years, then back sensationally to high levels under Putin. The two trends obviously connected; Putin’s regime was aggressively expanding state capacity as it squeezed out democracy. Yet in one surprising regard Putin may have been promoting longer-term changes that will eventually facilitate Russian democratization. Although he was permitting the Russian military dangerously broad autonomy in the Caucasus, he was also subordinating capitalists who had acquired extraordinary independence to state control. If, in the future, the Russian state again becomes subject to protected, mutually binding voice in dialogue with a broad, relatively equal citizenry, we may look back to Putin as the autocrat who took the first undemocratic steps toward that outcome.
How so? Remember the four elements of Louis XIV’s story: 1) buildup of central state power, 2) the state’s increasing priority of access to state-sustaining resources such as taxes, labor power, and military means, 3) reduced scope and strength for competing centers of autonomous coercive power, and 4) increasing dependence of support for state activities on citizen compliance, however grudging and coerced. The first three clearly apply to Putin’s Russia.
The fourth element is more complex and controversial. In the short run, Putin has reduced, not increased, his state’s reliance on citizen compliance for state-sustaining resources; so long as he controls the sale of gas and oil, he can afford to ignore Russians’ widespread evasion of taxes and other obligations. He need not think, furthermore, that anti-regime mobilizations led by such heroes as chess champion Garry Kasparov pose serious threats to his means of government, however much they hurt Putin’s international image and his demand for internal order. Nevertheless, the very monopolization of crucial energy resources raises the post-Putin question: once the president leaves Russia’s political scene, will another strongman simply succeed him, or will the very concentration of state control over sustaining resources facilitate some broader coalition’s seizure of state power?
In order to place that surprising possibility into theoretical and comparative perspective, we need to step back for a broader look at state-sustaining resources. Here, in machine-gun bursts, is my larger argument:
- No one can run a state without social arrangements that produce and reproduce resources supporting administration, political control, and patronage.
- Available resources vary with the ambient economy; historically, those resources have included:
- coercive means, including weapons, jails, and organized specialists in violence
- labor, especially skilled and/or effectively coordinated labor
- animals, especially domesticated food- and/or work-producing animals
- land, including natural resources located in and upon it
- commitment-maintaining institutions such as religious sects, kinship systems, and trade diasporas
- machines, especially machines that convert raw materials, produce goods or services, and transport persons, goods, services, or information
- financial capital – transferable and fungible means of acquiring property rights
- information, especially information that facilitates profitable, safe, or coordinated action
- media that disseminate such information
- scientific-technical knowledge, especially knowledge that facilitates intervention – for good or evil – in human welfare
- Later items on the list have become more prominent as supports for state capacity in recent centuries, but the earlier items on the list have by no means lost their significance across most of the contemporary world; the state’s incomplete control over coercive means, labor, animals, and land, for example, remains crucial to the system of rule in the world’s largest democracy, India.
- Rulers failing to acquire reproducible access to later resources on the list will eventually give way to competitors, internal or external, who do acquire that access.
- Rulers have three main ways of acquiring such resources: a) produce them in their own enterprises, b) seize them and exchange them for state-sustaining resources, e.g. oil for weapons, c) extract them from subject populations that already hold and/or produce the resources.
- Options a) and b) reduce the reliance of rulers on citizen consent and incentives for bargaining with civilian populations, hence constitute impediments to democratization, conceived of as increased breadth, equality, protection, and bindingness of popular voice. Although c) by no means guarantees democratization, it opens a possible path to democratization.
- Historically (with taxation being the most obvious process), most of the world's democratization over the last two hundred years has resulted in part from c), while a) and b) have mostly inhibited democratization.
- Nevertheless, if through a transfer of power (e.g. revolution or conquest) arrangement a) or b) becomes subject to popular collective control, that transfer likewise opens a path toward democratization.
Let us return to that list of possible state-sustaining resources in the ambient economy: coercive means, labor, land, and so on. Analysts of state formation generally assume – rightly, I think – that the distribution, ownership, and relative prevalence of such resources in a state’s setting strongly limit the forms of power that rulers can build.
Empires, for example, typically depend on agrarian economies and acquire their means of rule not through direct administration of those economies but through some combination of support from regional magnates and exaction of tribute from vulnerable adjacent populations. Mongol empires supported themselves largely through tribute exacted through brutal force, but depended for survival on their access to tribute-yielding agrarian populations. Below county level, even the mighty Chinese empire (which, incidentally, did pay tribute to the Mongols for several centuries) relied on compacts between its thin corps of bureaucrats and landlords throughout the empire.
City-states, in contrast, typically draw much more of their sustaining resources from financial capital accumulated through conquest and trade while extracting day to day subsistence from local populations of slaves or servants as well as from the agricultural workers of their nearby dependent territories, with the result that they buy elsewhere essential resources such as arms and troops. Although Italian city-states began the second millennium by closely coupling trade and predation in their relations with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, after 1400 or so they relied for armed force on militias and mercenaries financed both by exploitation of their subject populations and by their oligarchs’ returns from trade. A simple inventory of state-sustaining resources thus takes us a long way toward systematic differentiation among modes of rule.
Items farther down the resource list such as machines, financial capital, information, media, and scientific-technical knowledge have gained increasing influence as the world has become richer. If the notion that scientific-technical knowledge might ever rival financial capital as a basis of state power strikes you as far-fetched, consider how the Persian Gulf emirate Qatar is investing income from its huge but exhaustible supply of natural gas. The emir, Sheikh Hammad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, is investing billions in scientific education and research, with the project of making Qatar the Middle East’s research magnet.
The emir’s wife, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Misnad, runs the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, worth billions in its own right. She has committed the proceeds from an entire oil well, perhaps $80 million per year, to a scientific research fund. In a principality of 800 thousand people, the 500 students at the fledgling university, Education City, stand every chance of becoming a national elite (Science 2006). If the emir’s program succeeds, control over land (and in this case the fossil fuels beneath it) may well give way to control over scientific-technical knowledge as the chief basis of Qatar’s state power.
Remember the options rulers have for acquiring state-sustaining resources: a) produce them in their own enterprises, b) seize them and exchange them for state-sustaining resources, e.g. oil for weapons, c) extract them from subject populations that already hold and/or produce the resources. Qatar and similar energy-rich states are relying mainly on option b), acquiring state-sustaining resources by selling the products of monopolies over precious commodities. As their energy reserves decline, it will be fascinating to see how and how much they shift toward options a) and c).
Taxation follows option c). State taxation poses pressing questions for political analysts because in general taxpayers receive little or no individual quid pro quo when they pay. They may receive nothing at all, or they may receive small shares of collective goods. Why should they ever contribute (Herzog 1989, Levi 1988)? Yet states have regularly built themselves up through taxation, forced or otherwise (Ardant 1971-1972, Brewer 1989, Daunton 2001, Kozub 2003, Tilly 1992, chapter 3, Webber and Wildavsky 1986). As they have extracted taxes, they have often initiated cycles of intervention, resistance, repression, and bargaining: state agents demand payment, citizens resist, the government applies armed force, but in the process of overcoming resistance kills off some leaders, buys off others, and announces justifications for the present intervention that imply rules for proper interventions in the future – in short, repression combines with bargaining.
Intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycles range from small-scale resistance to mass rebellion. Among other struggles, the French Revolution of 1789-1799 involved just such a cycle. It ended with political reaction, but also with a regime that depended much more heavily on citizen consent than anyone could have imagined at the end of Louis XIV’s reign 80 years earlier.
Intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycles impose hidden political costs on states: although they commonly increase the flows of resources to the state, they also make the state dependent on those flows and set terms for the next round of extraction. In both these ways, they subject states to public politics and facilitate popular influence over public politics. Without usually promoting democratic consultation in the short run, they set conditions for democratization in the long run. As we saw in the tale of Louis XIV, the shift of a state toward dependence on citizens’ compliance with continued extraction increases the susceptibility of the regime to alternation between democratization and de-democratization. Intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycles push regimes across the susceptibility threshold.
Such cycles continue in contemporary China. Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü have surveyed Chinese rural tax resistance and its resolution during the 1990s. Despite governmental secrecy on such matters, Bernstein and Lü accumulated substantial evidence of rising resistance to arbitrarily imposed taxes and fees. Moreover, the peasants sometimes succeeded, received concessions from local authorities, drew the attention of high state officials to local abuses, and renegotiated the terms of future extraction.
A famous series of struggles in Renshou, Sichuan, during 1992 and 1993 incorporated a intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycle of this sort. There local cadres continued to impose heavy taxes and forced labor for road-building on peasant households despite a state campaign for “burden reduction.” When they could not get workers or cash, they seized household goods, including TVs, grain, and hogs. But under the leadership of peasant Zhang De’an, local people began fighting back. The county prosecutor tried to have Zhang arrested for tax evasion, but:
Zhang publicly tore up the arrest warrant as seven to eight hundred peasants carrying farm tools and shoulder poles gather in Xie’an township. They drove the arresting officers out and burned a police vehicle. Violence erupted the Xie’an township in January and February. Stores closed and the government was paralyzed. “Hundreds of peasants were said to have been involved in a ‘guerrilla war” of throwing stones.” Farmers marched to the county seat and jostled into the government compound, loudly demanding justice.
This popular mobilization aroused the Sichuan Party and government leaders to send a work team to Renshou in February. Given the national offensive on excessive burdens, the provincial and Renshou county officials “affirmed that Zhang De’an was reasonable in giving publicity to the policy about lessening peasants’ burdens and calling on people to refuse to pay the excess cash levy” (Bernstein and Lü 2003: 132-133).
Cadres fought back, and struggles continued in Renshou. By 1994, nevertheless, provincial and national authorities were clearly making concessions. They released peasants who had beaten cadres and police, replaced numerous officials, and contributed provincial funds for the building of local highways (Bernstein and Lü 2003: 136).
Let me be clear: the Renshou events did not establish that China was democratizing rapidly during the 1990s, much less that the Chinese state was collapsing. Since they provided a widely publicized model for state-citizen negotiation, nevertheless, they did activate a mechanism that subjected the state to public politics and, to a small degree, facilitated popular influence over public politics. In this case, the crucial mechanism was the intervention-resistance-repression-bargaining cycle. The accumulation of such confrontations and resolutions creates openings for democratization that did not exist before. As more Renshou-style cycles appear in China, the regime moves closer to broad, equal, protected, mutually binding citizen-state consultation – to democracy.
With the collapse of state socialism outside of China and North Korea, states that acquired their sustaining resources by producing those resources themselves practically disappeared. Except with regard to military force, China is moving rapidly away from any semblance of economic autonomy. But the second state-sustaining strategy – exchange of goods and services over whose production the state exerts monopolistic power – has survived and even thrived. Earlier we saw Vladimir Putin moving toward such a strategy by recapturing state control over oil and gas production that had largely escaped into private hands during the 1990s. After what seemed the near-collapse of the Russian state, Putin’s strategy has allowed him to smash his domestic political opposition at the same time as he has reestablished Russia as a world power.
Over the same period, energy-rich states could avoid bargaining for citizen consent by seizing control over energy production (often in collaboration with obliging foreign capitalists), selling on international markets, buying coercive means on other international markets, and paying off their main local supporters with the surplus. For all his populist gestures, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has used oil revenues with extraordinary effectiveness to bypass popular consent. We can witness similar strategies in a wide variety of so-called rentier states such as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and (I speculate) Iran.
My complex argument actually builds on only two simple components. First, whether rulers acquire their means of rule by producing those means, buying them with monopolized goods, or extracting them from subject populations deeply affects the character of rule. Second, over the long run democratization only occurs when rulers come to rely on citizen compliance for their means of rule.
The first component implies that students of fiscality could effectively strengthen their theories by considering the whole range of state-sustaining resources before closing in on taxation as a special, if very consequential, way of acquiring those resources.
The second component implies that students of fiscality are following the spoor of democratization and, for that matter, de-democratization. Together we can track down the causes of fundamental changes and variations in political regimes.
References
- Ardant, Gabriel (1971, 1972): Histoire de l'impôt. Paris: Fayard. 2 vols.
- Bernstein, Thomas P. and Xiaobo Lü (2002): Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brewer, John (1989): The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783. New York: Knopf.
- Daunton, Martin (2001): Trusting Leviathan. The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Fish, M. Steven (2005): Democracy Derailed in Russia. The Failure of Open Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- (2006): “Freedom in the World 2006. Selected Data from Freedom House’s Annual Global Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties,” www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=5, viewed 11 March 2006
- Herzog, Don (1989): Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Human Rights Watch (2006): “Overview of Human Rights Issues in Russia” www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/18/russia2218.htm
- Kozub, Robert M. (2003): “Evolution of Taxation in England, 1700-1850: A Period of War and Industrialization,” Journal of European Economic History 32: 363-390.
- Ledeneva, Alena (1998): Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Levi, Margaret (1988): Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Schmitt, Gary J. (2006): “Natural Gas. The Next Energy Crisis?” Issues in Science and Technology, Summer, 59-64.
- Science (2006): “Qatar Taps Wells of Knowledge,” Science 312 (7 April), 46-47.
- Tilly, Charles (1992): Coercion, Capital, and European States, 990-1992. Oxford: Blackwell; revised edn.
- Varese, Federico (2001): The Russian Mafia. Private Protection in a New Market Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Volkov, Vadim (2002): The Monopoly of Force. Violent Entrepreneurs in Russia’s Emerging Markets. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Webber, Carolyn and Aaron Wildavsky (1986): A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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