The Political and Legal Institutionalization of Traditional Values: The Experience of Post-Soviet States

Abstract

This article examines the common and distinctive features of the legal and regulatory acts of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan that codify traditional (national) values. From a comparative perspective, and drawing on comparative, thesaurus-based, and content analysis, it identifies how values are defined, the reasons for their legal codification, the degree of overlap among value sets, the relationship between traditional values and the values enshrined in constitutions, and the potential impact of legal retr aditionalization on the political process, including through the institutionalization of bodies responsible for preserving and transmitting values. The study finds substantial similarity across the countries under consideration in both the circumstances surrounding the adoption of legal and regulatory acts on values and in the content of those acts. The need to codify values is justified through the discourse of national security, which is used as an instrument in struggles for power and as a means of strengthening the legitimacy of power. An analysis of the relationship between the values presented in constitutions, on the one hand, and in presidential legal and regulatory acts, on the other, shows that these values overlap in many respects but do not fully correspond to one another. As a result, the de facto understanding of traditional values is narrower than the understanding of constitutional values. The shared value core includes the concepts of “tradition”, “value”, “state”, and “the people”, reflecting the combination of statist and populist components in the discourse of ruling elites. The establishment of new supra-parliamentary bodies of direct popular representation, which serve as actors in the preservation and transmission of traditional values, is also considered in the context of retraditionalization and the strengthening of the legitimacy of state leaders. The author concludes that political elites are capable of turning particular traditions and values into instruments for strengthening the legitimacy of power, regardless of the set of values that predominates in society.