Russia’s centralized authoritarianism in the disguise of democratic federalism: Evidence from the September 2017 sub-national elections

Abstract

While formally a federation that vests significant powers in the sub-national bodies of government and leaves it for its federal units and municipalities to decide who will govern them by conducting elections, the Russian Federation is effectively a centralized authoritarian state. This paper uses evidence from the September 2017 sub-national elections in Russia to examine the role of formal political institutions in sustaining the country’s political regime. The analysis shows that the political domination of the pro-government party over the regional political assemblies is sustained by a complex combination of party regulations and electoral rules. In particular, gubernatorial elections are organized and conducted in a way that ensures the victories of the incumbent governors who are effectively appointed by the president of Russia.

Do political connections make businesspeople richer? Evidence from Russia, 2003–2010

“…Another advantage of Russia as a case is that it provides researchers with a number of clear-cut and testable natural expectations about the potency of different kinds of connections grounded in Russia's political dynamics in the 2000s. First, the way federal relations in the 2000s evolved suggests that over time regional-level connections should have lost their strength due to a series of centralizing political reforms implemented by the federal authorities, the most important of which led to the effective weakening of the heads of the regional executive (Golosov, 2018). Second, as autocracy consolidated in Russia in the 2000s and the federal executive tightened its grip over the parliament (Remington, 2016), the connections at the federal legislature should have weakened.…”

Multilevel governance and women's legislative representation

“…Second, over time, political authority vested in the Russian regions has become less important in real life than on paper. The process of recentralization of power by the federal centre has led to the predominance of informal relations between Moscow and regional governments and to increased control of regional affairs by the federal centre (Golosov 2011(Golosov , 2018. These factors blur the relationship in Russia between RAI and women's legislative representation.…”

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

“…Studies on subnational politics in Russia highlight different features of electoral authoritarianism in the regions, showing how the Kremlin-backed incumbents and candidates win gubernatorial elections, as well as how regional legislative elections help manage intra-elite conflicts and strengthen the co-optation of the systemic opposition (Golosov 2018;Smyth and Turovsky 2018;Ross and Panov 2019). In general, compared with the significant variation of the subnational regimes in the 1990s, ranging from electoral democracies to hegemonic autocracies, the authoritarian turn produced a more homogenized field of subnational regimes limited to the different shades of autocratic rule (Golosov 2011;Ross and Panov 2019;Libman and Rochlitz 2019).…”