Federal Regression and the Authoritarian Turn in Russia

From failed democratization to the war against Ukraine: what happened to Russian institutions under Putin?

“…Klimovich (2023) argues for labelling this system as federal autocracy and use the term authoritarian federalism to explain the logic of the co-existence of formal federal nature and authoritarian regime in Russian politics. The bulk of the literature on Russian federalism studies the massive centralization and, as a result, defederalization, or federal regression, of the country under Putin (Ross 2010;Kropp 2019;Klimovich and Kropp 2022). The research vividly demonstrates how Putin's reforms switched off the Federation Council, as a chamber representing regional interests, subordinated regional elites through the introduction of an additional para-constitutional level of government between the center and regions, as well as eliminated the political autonomy of the regions by replacing the direct election of governors with their practical appointment 3 (Goode 2007;Sharafutdinova 2010;Ross and Turovsky 2013).…”