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The politics of public administration in the Russian Federation
Abstract
This chapter discusses how public administration has turned into an influential political actor in the Russian Federation. The chapter puts forward three main arguments. First, the reinforcement of public administration since the early 2000s is closely linked to an overall strengthening of the executive, a recentralization of power, and a trend towards autocratization. Second, public administration has become relatively more influential in the politics-administration relationship due to the weakening of electoral politics, as political competition and political parties only play a marginal role in the Russian political system. Third, the blurring of boundaries
between the political and administrative spheres and the bureaucratization of politics has roots in the Soviet period, as the historical legacies of tsarism and communism continue to influence today’s administrative culture. Overall, the chapter maintains that a technocratic approach and the powerful public administration have, on the one hand, been able to improve the quality and the effectiveness of public service. On the other hand, autocratization and the lack of democratic accountability impedes the creation of a bureaucracy that purely acts in the interests of citizens.
Politicians in all types of regimes require bureaucracy to extend their rule over society. To prevent administrators from becoming too powerful and publicly signal independence, they seemingly arbitrarily criticize public officials. But when and how do political leaders blame bureaucracy – and when do they praise it ? This study uses Russia as a case to illustrate the complex and ambiguous politics-administration relationship in non-Western regimes. We argue that public statements about bureaucracy accommodate two different legitimation strategies. We provide a content analysis of 311 public statements, from 1917 – 2017, on the role of administration in the country’s development. We find that attention to administrative affairs coincides with major political changes and periods of political instability in the history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Over a century, the rhetoric of Russian leaders oscillated between blaming and praising bureaucracy to secure stability and overcome obstacles in implementing governing strategies. The strategic interplay between assertive rhetoric and praising bureaucracy is part of an effective political leadership survival strategy.
It is frequently claimed within the politicization literature that while governments around the world are increasingly politicizing senior public service appointments, the nature and extent of this politicization varies across administrative traditions. To date, however, differences across administrative traditions have received little empirical scrutiny; research tends to be more comparable than comparative. Using data from an expert survey systematically measuring the merit-, political-, and personal-recruitment of senior public servants in 20 countries, this article examines differences across and within the Nordic, Westminster, Germanic and Napoleonic administrative traditions, in addition to the alternative Anglo-American and Southern European traditions. Various tests show meaningful variation in politicization across administrative traditions, with the starkest differences found between the Nordic and Napoleonic traditions. The results also show less variation among the countries comprising the Nordic tradition than that found within the other traditions.
Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy’s eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the “end of history” in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the “end of democracy” now.
Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult. Most contemporary regimes hold de-jure multiparty elections with universal suffrage. In some countries, elections ensure that political rulers are—at least somewhat—accountable to the electorate whereas in others they are a mere window dressing exercise for authoritarian politics. Hence, regime types need to be distinguished based on the de-facto implementation of democratic institutions and processes. Using V-Dem data, we propose with Regimes of the World (RoW) such an operationalization of four important regime types—closed and electoral autocracies; electoral and liberal democracies—with vast coverage (almost all countries from 1900 to 2016). We also contribute a solution to a fundamental weakness of extant typologies: The unknown extent of misclassification due to uncertainty from measurement error. V-Dem’s measures of uncertainty (Bayesian highest posterior densities) allow us to be the first to provide a regime typology that distinguishes cases classified with a high degree of certainty from those with “upper” and “lower” bounds in each category. Finally, a comparison of disagreements with extant datasets (7%–12% of the country-years), demonstrates that the RoW classification is more conservative, classifying regimes with electoral manipulation and infringements of the political freedoms more frequently as electoral autocracies, suggesting that it better captures the opaqueness of contemporary autocracies.
How does the degree of centralization and decentralization of political control affect economic performance? To investigate this question, we gather and analyze a comprehensive original data-set measuring the performance, career paths, and incentives of regional officials in China and Russia during the last 15 years. Both China and Russia combine centralized personnel selection with substantial administrative autonomy for regional officials, but differ substantially with respect to the economic outcomes produced by their bureaucratic systems. We find that in contrast to China, regional leaders in Russia are unlikely to be promoted for economic or social performance, have a lower turnover, are almost never transferred from one region to another, have less experience in executive positions, are more likely to come from the region they govern than their Chinese counterparts, and are not encouraged to show initiative in economic affairs and engage in economic policy experimentation.
This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organizations capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a democracy. A review of the basic assumptions and empirical work on organizational reputation in the public sector identifies a series of stylized facts that extends our understanding of the functioning of public agencies. InparticuUr, the authors examine the relationship between organizational reputation and bureaucratic autonomy.
This paper considers current contradictions in state–business relations in Russia. On one hand, the Russian political elite needs economic growth to keep social stability in the country and to limit mass protesting in big cities. Economic growth is impossible without investment, which explains Russian leaders' increased interest in improving Russia's business climate. On the other hand, influential interest groups (represented first of all by security and law enforcement agencies) try to expand their control on rent sources in the economy. These groups of interests could strengthen their positions due to fear of political protests. This strong conflict among different groups in the Russian elite creates additional uncertainty for investors and the business community, and can lead to economic recession independent of the level of oil prices and dynamics of global markets. Reversing these negative trends in economic development will be possible only with collective actions of different economic and political actors (including technocrats in federal and regional governments, representatives of large and successful middle-sized business and top-managers of public sector organizations) in the search for pragmatic solutions to the challenges faced by Russian economy and society.
This article argues that Russia has a peculiar form of authoritarianism that exhibits pronounced technocratic features. The analysis places in a comparative frame the bases of regime legitimacy and the paths to political, administrative, and economic power in Russia. By locating the Russian state in a matrix that considers the ideology of governance on one axis and the backgrounds of elites on the other, the article highlights areas of overlap and separation between state–society relations in Russia and other regimes in the developed and developing world. It also illustrates the ways in which technocratic elites in Russia differ from their counterparts in other parts of the world.
This article examines how the Putin leadership, inspired by the example of Yuriy Andropov, has carried out a comprehensive "sovietization" of the Russian political system by systematically eliminating all alternative sources of power (governors, competitive elections, the media, and private business). Drawing on legislation, the press, and data about the backgrounds and career paths of the post-Soviet elite, the central institutions are compared with their Soviet predecessors and the implementation of this strategy is examined. The roles of military, security and other backgrounds are analyzed. The degree of influence likely to be wielded by the siloviki is also considered.
Theory: In the literature on policy innovation diffusion, political scientists have paid little attention to how ideas for innovation gain prominence on government agendas. By considering the actions of policy entrepreneurs - political actors who promote policy ideas - we can gain important insights into the process of policy innovation and innovation diffusion. Hypotheses: Policy entrepreneurs constitute an identifiable class of political actors. Their presence and actions can significantly raise the probability of legislative consideration and approval of policy innovations. Methods: Event history analyses of the determinants of legislative consideration and approval of an idea for education reform - school choice - in the 48 contiguous United States from 1987 through 1992. The data set consists of unique information collected in a mail survey of members of the education policy elite in each state, augmented with published statistics. Results: Policy entrepreneurs were identified as advocates of school choice in 26 states. While controlling for rival hypotheses, the presence and actions of policy entrepreneurs were found to raise significantly the probability of legislative consideration and approval of school choice as a policy innovation. These results suggest policy entrepreneurs should be given more attention in the literature on policy innovation diffusion.
In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized as historical, multidimensional, disaggregated, and transparent. We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.
The common feature of CEE systems is that they change drastically. Political systems change, e.g. from dictatorships to democracies, and their elites are removed. Democratic checks and balances are established. State structures are reshuffled, e.g. toward more decentralisation. The economic system changes its nature, e.g. from state monopolies to market systems with private firms. Societal and social systems with NGOs, not-for-profit organisations and citizen action groups are established and are designed for people to participate actively in the public debate and to become stakeholders of their society and their communities (Peters 1996).
To achieve planned changes, CEE countries had to choose their strategies. In focusing on the administration and the management of public systems, five scopes of reform are possible, from very narrow and limited to a very widespread and broad span of reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). Choosing one of these models has tremendous practical implications for the content of a reform programme, for the choice of the reform projects, for the sequence and timing of the reform portfolio. It also requires different tactical choices to be made. One of the issues is how many degrees of freedom there are to reform the public sector.
Just as in many other countries, mixed strategies have been chosen for public- sector reform in CEE countries, and these choices have changed over time. However, it seems that the span of reform has rather been broad than narrow. It also seems that tactics could have been more visible than strategy because of electoral cycles.
This brings us to the question of the trajectories to move ahead. Our article, heavily based in the joint NISPAcee research project4 tries to respond to some selected dimensions of the question of what the common and different trajectories and selected outcomes of public administration / management reforms are in the CEE region.
Political-administrative relations have been transformed in most European countries along the lines of a double process. On the one hand, managerial rules have been absorbed or domesticated by administrative elites in a complex strategy aiming at differentiating layers of power within the political-administrative sphere and drawing new frontiers between managers and top-managers enjoying a ‘political’ status. On the other hand, partisan politicization of appointments or careers reveal an attempt to privatize power and to put aside neutral professionals. In most, if not all, European countries, the 2008 fiscal crisis has fed a popular rejection of both the political class and the privatization of power while the social and professional status of civil servant were still valued both in economic and social terms.
Voluntary assessments by a team of critical friends (external peer challenges) among local governments became established as popular complement to compulsory and centralized audits and inspections. This study empirically investigates the decision of English local authorities to have a voluntary peer challenge or not by taking advantage of an original dataset about participation in the Local Government Association’s Peer Challenge Programme (CPC) 2010–2015. We find that the LGA’s CPC programme does not carry a risk of leaving behind authorities with performance shortcomings. Councils with poor past performance scores and those with excellent ones do not differ in their tendency to invite a team of critical friends. Spatial clusters exist in the case of small district councils but not in the case of larger unitary authorities, London boroughs and metropolitan authorities. This implies that the corporate peer challenge process seems to be more suited to small authorities delivering community based services.
Citizen online participation has become an increasingly important feature of policymaking in nondemocratic regimes. This article explores the question of why nondemocratic governments promote e‐participation tools. To address this question, this research examines the motives for the introduction of the Active Citizen e‐voting platform in Moscow through an in‐depth case study drawing on interviews and qualitative document analysis. The case study identifies a variety of objectives pursued by the Moscow city government with the promotion of e‐participation and relates them to three legitimation strategies, namely, input‐based legitimation, output‐based legitimation and discourse‐based legitimation. The results underscore how controlled e‐participation may combine different legitimation strategies without challenging the distribution of decision‐making power.
In this paper we propose a comprehensive methodology for assessing the development of the tax system and tax service of the Russian Federation in 1991—2018. Then we have tested this methodology on statistical data and calculated the indices, and compiled a chronology of key events in the development of the tax system of the Russian Federation and the development of tax authorities. Also we have verified the hypothesis of the presence of statistical relationship in the development of the tax system and tax authorities. We reveal a high degree of statistical compliance of the tax system and the tax service development indices. Mismatch in the dynamics of their development in the period of 2014—2018 is caused by both the post-crisis slowdown in economic growth and negative trends in government regulation (the emergence of new taxes, increased tax burden on businesses, etc.).
The issue of poor performance of the Russian federal bureaucracy is addressed by linking performance to type of official, through analysis of biographical data on deputy ministers and division (departament) heads in five federal ministries since 2012, supplemented by internet searches on behavior, particularly of a corrupt nature. Education, previous career experience, and recruitment, including its timing relative to superiors and subordinates, are analyzed, in order to determine whether officials behave primarily as members of patrimonial teams, as members of problem-solving organizations, as self-serving individuals, as the instruments of capture by commercial organizations, or as servants of bureaucratic agency interests. The data do not strongly support any one conclusion, but problem-solving officials have the strongest presence.
This article analyses the successes and shortcomings of eGovernment reform in Russia in the context of three main aspects: public services provision; state regulatory activities; and interdepartmental interaction. The research was prompted by the rapid ascent of Russia in international eGovernment rankings, which reflects a more intense utilisation of information and communication technologies in the sphere of public administration. Within a short period of time, reformers were able to install a considerably advanced eGovernment architecture, supporting interactive and transactional remote access to government services. Yet, further progression towards a more responsive government and eDemocracy requires the adoption of higher standards of openness and accountability.
Being an empire is inseparable from modern Russian identity and historical experience: the Russian empire was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how Russia’s many subject areas were conquered and how the empire was governed. It considers the Russian empire a “Eurasian empire,” characterized by a “politics of difference”: the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state’s needs minimally (control over defense, taxation and mobilization of resources, criminal law) and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies but not allowing “horizontal” connections across social, ethnic, confessional, or other groups potentially with common interest. This book gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups as it surveys strategies of governance-centralized bureaucracy, military reform, judicial system, tolerance of difference. It pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media, particularly symbolic, such as public ritual, painting, architecture, and urban planning. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, the book explores the empire’s primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, religions, nobility, and high culture. It tracks the emergence of an “Imperial nobility” and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire’s many peoples and cultures.
The article analyzes the current model of intergovernmental relations in Russia and explains how it was formed in the 2000s, as well as demonstrating its effects in one sphere of public administration, namely education. Based on theoretical perspectives on the expected and unexpected effects of decentralization, authoritarian politicians' motives and central governments' strategies aimed at overcoming the principal-agency problem, the author hypothesizes that decentralization realized under the conditions of an authoritarian government in geographically, ethnically and economically complex societies produces a kind of trap. Concentration on administrative decentralization intensifies the principal-agent problem while the authoritarian rulers' interests limit the potential for employing effective means to overcome it.
The debate on regime change has experienced a U-turn. Attention has shifted from the regime transitions occurred during the so-called third wave of democratization to the signals of an incipient reverse trend. However, the actual import and urgency of the problem remain unclear, due to a growing confusion concerning what a process opposite to democratization is, how many distinct forms it can take, and consequently what the empirical referents of the phenomenon are. Building on the notion of “autocratization”, or regime change towards autocracy, the paper elaborates a framework for the comparative analysis of regime changes opposite to democratization. Specifically, we identify political participation, public contestation and executive limitation as the main dimensions of regime variance, define autocratization accordingly, illustrate and systematize the different regime transitions that fall under this label, and clarify what autocratization is not. The proposed conceptual and analytical framework could support future research on comparative autocratization.
The article analyses the system of public governance in Russia, including two main sub-divisions of reforms, namely, civil service reform, and administrative reform. The authors examine the principal historical stages of both reforms as the parts of the Russian system of public governance evolution. The configuration of main actors of Russian governance reforms and of government–market relations are presented. The paper focuses on generalising some major characteristics of the administrative mechanisms of governance in Russia as the complex and interlinked entities. Some key elements of Russian governance reforms are described, including organisational aspects of civil service, optimisation of the functions and structure of the executive bodies, implementation of results-based management mechanisms and improvement of the regulatory system, public services delivery, one stop shop procedures, E-government.
The elimination of the Communist Party at the beginning of the 1990s foreshadowed a new path to power in post-communist Russia.1 In the first years after the Soviet collapse, it appeared that patterns of political elite recruitment in Russia might parallel those found in many democratic countries, where parliament and private business serve as training grounds for those assuming leading executive posts. By the beginning of the Putin era, however, it was clear that careers in state administration — rather than elective politics or private industry — had become both the dominant path to political power and an important training ground for business elites.2 This is not, of course, just a Russian pattern. As Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman observed, ‘although most countries of the Third World today have organizations labeled “legislatures”, “parties”, and “bureaucracies”, in few of these systems is power actually divided between elected politicians and career administrators’.3
A democracy fetish has characterized much Western research on Russia in the post-communist era. Although Russia’s adherence to democratic principles is a legitimate concern of the social sciences—as well as of Western governmental and non-governmental organizations—the development of modern states is too complex a phenomenon to be dominated by a single normative or empirical category. Besides assessing the capacity of society to hold its leaders accountable—the democracy test—one must also measure the capacity of the state to ‘control the governed,’ to use Madison’s phrase. Yet it is only recently that scholars have begun to examine seriously the capacity of the post-communist Russian state, by which we mean the ability of the political leadership in Moscow to implement its decisions throughout Russia’s far-flung territory.1
The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 ushered into existence a new type of political system very different from any which had preceded it. The innovative thing about this new system was the place that the ruling Communist Party occupied in it.1 The party was dominant in the system. Its branches were found in all organizations in the USSR, its members were meant to exercise leading and guiding authority in all of those organizations, and throughout the society in general, and its leadership made all of the most important decisions for the Soviet state. It was clearly the most influential institutional body in the Soviet system. But throughout its life as the ruling institution of the Soviet Union, the party suffered from a basic tension within the rules, norms and procedures that were designed to structure the way the party worked.
The personnel and organizational culture of Russian officialdom changed little in the initial stages of the transition from Soviet rule,1 but the collapse of the Communist Party bureaucracy in the last months of the Soviet era weakened the state and unleashed a protracted political struggle that reshaped the institutional landscape in which Russian officialdom functioned. This contest, which involved the federal president, the federal parliament, and the governments of Russia’s 89 regions and republics, passed through two decisive stages. In the first stage, from 1991 to 1993, the president emerged triumphant in a bitter battle with parliament. President Yeltsin institutionalized his victory in the December 1993 Constitution, the provisions of which reduced the ability of parliament to restrain presidential power.
Political scientists and public administration scholars have long recognized that innovation in public agencies is heavily dependent on entrepreneurial bureaucratic executives. But unlike their commercial counterparts, public administration "entrepreneurs" do not profit from their innovations. What motivates enterprising public executives? How are they created? Manuel Teodoro's theory of bureaucratic executive ambition explains why pioneering leaders aren't the result of serendipity, but rather arise out of predictable institutional design. Teodoro explains the systems that foster or frustrate entrepreneurship among public executives. Through case studies and quantitative analysis of original data, he shows how psychological motives and career opportunities shape administrators' decisions, and he reveals the consequences these choices have for innovation and democratic governance. Tracing the career paths and political behavior of agency executives, Teodoro finds that when advancement involves moving across agencies, ambitious bureaucrats have strong incentives for entrepreneurship. Where career advancement occurs vertically within a single organization, ambitious bureaucrats have less incentive for innovation, but perhaps greater accountability. This research introduces valuable empirical methods and has already generated additional studies. A powerful argument for the art of the possible, Bureaucratic Ambition advances a flexible theory of politics and public administration. Its lessons will enrich debate among scholars and inform policymakers and career administrators. © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Like their democratic counterparts, authoritarian rulers need effective courts to perform the basic functions of courts-to resolve disputes, to impose social control, and to regulate at least aspects of public life (Shapiro 1981). At the same time, these rulers are often reluctant to endow courts with significant power in the form of politically sensitive jurisdiction and the discretion to make far-reaching choices. Yet, the record shows that some authoritarian regimes-for example, well-established or liberalizing ones-do entrust their courts with such responsibilities for holding public administration accountable, managing major commercial conflicts, and even maintaining quasi-constitutional order (Moustafa 2005; Ginsburg 2006). Under what circumstances authoritarian rulers opt for judicial power and with what risks, consequences, and compromises are questions ripe for comparative study.This chapter examines the experience of three Russian states-Tsarist Russia (from the Judicial Reform of 1864); the USSR (including the late period of liberalization); and post-Soviet Russia (a hybrid regime that moved from electoral democracy to electoral or competitive authoritarianism). The chapter begins with two theoretical issues-(1) judicial independence and its relationship to judicial power and (2) distinctions among types of authoritarian regimes.
The essay explores why some socio-economic reforms are successful and others are not and why and how the political regime and its institutions affect policy outcomes and the implementation of a ‘narrow’ programme of authoritarian modernisation, characterised by the achievement of socio-economic growth without full-scale democratisation. It reconsiders the Russian experience of policy reforms in the 2000s as a case of authoritarian modernisation in the context of post-Communist policy changes where less than half of the proposals have been implemented, and only a few have been successful. The essay attempts to explain the factors and mechanisms of the successes and failures of policy reforms, focusing on the one hand, on the impact of electoral authoritarianism and the poor quality of the state on opportunities and constraints for policy changes, and, on the other hand, on the institutional factors which affect the vertical and horizontal fragmentation of the Russian government and the efficiency or inefficiency of its policies.
A return to organized personnel pools instead of a politically neutral civil service system may facilitate authoritarian rule in Russia.
The dominant paradigm for understanding contemporary Russia holds that Vladimir Putin's tenure in office has been accompanied by a massive influx of former KGB and military personnel – so-called “siloviki” – into positions of power and authority throughout the polity and economy. Claims of extensive elite militarization, however, are largely based on the analyses of only one research program and, moreover, the validity of the estimates produced by that research program is open to question on numerous grounds. In this article, we review existing research on elite militarization in Russia; discuss a series of conceptual and empirical issues that need to be resolved if valid and meaningful estimation of military–security representation is to be achieved; introduce new findings; and evaluate the totality of existing evidence regarding whether the Russian state under Putin deserves to be labeled a militocracy. We find that the most straightforward reading of existing data indicates that the percentage of siloviki in the political elite during Putin's first two terms as president was approximately half of that which has been widely reported in both scholarship and the media, and also declined during the Medvedev presidency. In addition, our analysis of a broader cross section of the elite estimates military–security representation during the Putin presidency to have been lower still. Overall, existing data paint a less alarming picture of the depths to which siloviki have penetrated the corridors of power since 2000 than has been commonly portrayed and thereby cast doubt on Russia's status as an “FSB state.” On the other hand, past trends also provide some basis for expecting that the numbers of siloviki will once again rise during Putin's current presidential term.
Do hybrid regimes have policy processes distinct from other regime types? This article explores this issue through a case study of police reform in Russia, focusing specifically on the adoption of a new Law on the Police from 2009 to 2011. Drawing on concepts from the comparative policymaking literature, the study traces the policy enactment process and shows how the public parts of the process were largely (but not entirely) a façade behind which the real policy process took place.
This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.
In Russia, politicians routinely select technical, non-party cabinets whose political outlook is difficult to decipher. The article asks how variation in politicians' preferences along the democratic-authoritarian dimension shapes political skills sought in cabinets and how ministers sharing politicians' aims are selected. The account of ministerial selection is tested in a controlled, comparative analysis of ministerial appointments in Russia, using an original dataset covering all full ministers appointed by presidents Boris Yel'tsin and Vladimir Putin, 1992-2008. The results clarify several important debates about the political implications of changes to cabinet composition in Russia and contribute to a more nuanced general understanding of the politics of technical cabinets.
The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the NATO Defense College. The article builds on views first outlined in a briefing paper published by Chatham House in May 2011 and presented to a discussion group at Chatham House in July 2011. The author would like to thank the participants for their comments and reflections. The author has also benefited from correspondence with Wayne Allensworth, and would like to thank members of the Roman Baths group and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on the text.
The challenge of implementing administrative reform (AR) in the Russian Federation corresponds to international ideas and practice of improving public administration that were conceptually based on the theory of New Public Management (NPM), which supposes the delegation of some state functions to commercial structures and civil society institutes. However, the results of the efforts to implement AR in Russia are not yet satisfactory. An important cause of failure was the fact that the application of the AR model to Russian conditions had not been conceptually worked out to a sufficient degree and, in particular, the question of the role and functions of contemporary government had not been thought through. In essence, the attempt was made to apply a number of sound and rational principles in the absence of many key preconditions that evoke a need for this model.
A cabinet job represents the zenith of a political career, whether in Russia or elsewhere. Yet the turnover of cabinet members is affected, albeit in varying degrees, by the duration of the government, that is, the length of its stay in office. The goal of this study is to analyse ministerial turnover in Russia. The chronological scope of the study is about 14 years, from July 1990, when the first transitional prime minister, Ivan Silaev, was appointed, to February 2004, when the cabinet of Mikhail Kas'yanov was dissolved. The study seeks to address several questions. First, I will discuss the duration of Russian governments in a comparative perspective. Second, I will analyse the turnover of ministers in Russia. Specifically, I will examine rotation across governments and types of ministerial specialisation. I will also consider the cases of short-term and long-lasting ministers. Finally, I will inquire into the turnover of deputy prime ministers and first deputy prime ministers, who constitute a 'buffer group' between prime minister and ordinary ministers in the Russian government.
This article assesses Russia’s post-Soviet efforts to reform its public service in order to meet the challenges of social and economic transition and describes both obstacles to the creation of a modern public service and efforts to overcome them. First, the authors provide a snapshot of the public service in Russia since 1991. Second, they describe aspects of the Soviet legacy that have impeded efforts to modernize the public service. Third, they identify some of the traumas of transition experienced in the 1990s that have circumscribed efforts at reform. Finally, the authors identify gaps between the legislation enacted by the Duma and the limited implementation of that legislation to date. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of public service reform in Russia.
In recent times much has been made of the threat some argue is posed by political advisers to the impartiality of the Westminster civil service. Drawing on survey of senior New Zealand civil servants, this article examines the degree to which political advisers are perceived as a threat to civil service neutrality and describes the form taken by that threat as variously perceived. On the evidence reported, it is suggested that traditional understandings of “politicization” need to be reconceptualized if they are to fully account for the nature of the relationship between political and civil service advisers. To existing conceptions of politicization, therefore, the article proposes adding another: “administrative politicization,” allowing for different gradations of politicization to be identified, and enabling a nuanced assessment of the nature and extent of a risk to civil service neutrality that, the data suggest, is not as great as is sometimes alleged.
This article applies broad conceptual categories of comparative politics to the explanation of administrative reforms in Italy. It takes as its argument some lines of influence on public sector reform of the features of the party system in Italy, the executive-legislative balance, the politician-bureaucrat relationship, and the role of administrative law. In the search for explanations for the trajectory of administrative reform, pre-existing political and institutional factors also have to be interpreted through the lens of negotiated change occurring via processes of conversion and layering involving new and old institutions that has taken place in Italy since the ‘political crisis' began in 1992.
Elections are among the most important and least understood institutions in contemporary authoritarian regimes. Theoretically, electoral authoritarian regimes should have an informational advantage that makes them more robust than other types of authoritarian regimes, but much empirical evidence suggests otherwise. In this paper we offer a new perspective on why this might be the case. Specifically, we consider how authoritarian elections influence a ruler’s choices in making cadre appointments. We argue that the imperative of winning authoritarian elections forces authoritarian leaders to prioritize the appointment of politically loyal cadres, who can help the regime win elections. This choice often comes at the expense of appointing officials who are competent at making good public policy and promoting economic development, factors that may contribute to long-term regime stability. We test this theory using an original dataset of gubernatorial appointments in one leading contemporary authoritarian regime, Russia.
In studies of innovation, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for new policies and then expend resources to promote them. But studies of policy entrepreneurs have generally focused on the demand for innovation, while neglecting the supply side of policy entrepreneurship. This article argues that bureaucratic labor markets affect the emergence of policy entrepreneurs, and so affect the diffusion of policy innovations across local governments in the United States. Analysis of a survey of municipal police chiefs and water utility managers relates governments' hiring and promotion policies to their adoption of professionally fashionable innovations. Agency heads who advanced to their current positions diagonally (arriving from another organization) are more likely to initiate these innovations than are agency heads who were promoted from within. Bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs emerge where government demand for innovation meets a supply of mobile administrators, who carry the priorities of their professions into the agencies that they serve.
Russian civil service management: How civil servants are recruited and promoted
- Alexey G Barabashev
- N Vadim
- Prokofiev
Barabashev, Alexey G. and Vadim N. Prokofiev. 2014. Russian civil service management: How civil
servants are recruited and promoted. The NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy 7(1),
9-28.