Variation in subnational electoral authoritarianism: evidence from the Russian Federation

Businesspeople in Elected Office: Identifying Private Benefits from Firm-Level Returns

“…First, the findings may be generalizable to other settings, including countries considered more democratic than Russia. Roughly 10-15% of the parliaments studied in this paper are located in regions classified as electorally democratic as the Philippines (Saikkonen 2015). Businesspeople run for political office in countries worldwide, no matter the institutional environment, while policies banning them from doing so are not widespread (Braendle and Stutzer 2013).…”

The range and limitation of sub-national regime variations under electoral authoritarianism: The case of Russia

“…However, Putin's centralising policies and "power vertical" sought to bring the regions under central control rather than making them identical. Important variations in the degrees of democracy and authoritarianism are still present at the regional level, and regional elites, particularly in the ethnic republics have been able to carve out significant areas of political autonomy, as long as they keep ethnic tensions at bay and deliver votes to the Kremlin Ross 2013, 2016;Saikkonen 2016). As Libman notes, 'some regions of Russia are characterized by higher levels of political pluralism… and the governor has to recruit the support of multiple elite factions to effectively govern the province ' (2017, 129), whilst in other regions, there is a 'complete unity of the regional elite under the control of the governor.…”

Blessing and Curse

“…Similarly, recent research studying oil-rich units located within countries with hybrid regimes confirms the harmful effects of oil on local contestation. For instance, Saikkonen (2016) studies variation in gubernatorial competitiveness in the Russian Federation, focusing on electoral authoritarian regimes, that is, settings with multicandidate but not fully free and fair elections. She argues that differences in electoral competitiveness in the Russian regions are largely explained by access to resource rents, as they allow governors to control economic resources for patronage purposes.…”

“…1 Indeed, in countries ranging from Argentina to Canada to Russia, subnational units enjoy levels of oil rents similar to those of countries in the Middle East. Although recent studies argue that subnational rentier units suffer from the same nondemocratic tendency as their national counterparts (Goldberg, Wibbels, & Mvukiyehe, 2008;Mahdavi, 2015;Monteiro & Ferraz, 2012;Saikkonen, 2016), evidence suggests that the political consequences of subnational rentierism are varied. For example, Alaska (the United States), Tierra del Fuego (Argentina), Chubut (Argentina), and Tarija (Bolivia), among others, have contested elections and experienced gubernatorial turnover.…”