Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

Abstract

Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party "Yabloko" to the government party "United Russia" on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

Environmental Politics in Authoritarian Regimes: Waste Management in Russian Regions

“…All of Russia's regions are electoral authoritarian regimes but there are still different levels of regime competitiveness, with some regions being more competitive and others more hegemonic (Buckley and Reuter 2019;Panov and Ross 2013;Ross and Panov 2019). There are regimes with a higher level of political competition, such as Sverdlovsk Oblast and Perm Krai, regions with quasi-authoritarian regimes, like Kemerovo and Tatarstan, and also personalistic dictatorships in the republics of the North Caucasus (Rochlitz, Mitrokhina, and Nizovkina 2021). To measure the degree of authoritarianism in the regions, we use the regional-level election results for the United Russia party in the State Duma elections (UR Duma vote share) that show the level of political support for the ruling party.…”

Means for control over the activities of public authorities by civic democratic institutions: the conceptual framework analysis

“…The fifth direction is the relationship between the public authorities and civic institutions, through the provision of social and public services. In this case, we are talking about the real empowerment of some civic institutions to implement social protection and provide public services (Rochlitz et al, 2020).…”