Local Heroes

The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691092812, 9780691011950
• eBook ISBN: 9780691228044
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Local Heroes, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss analyzes a crucial aspect of one of the great dramas of modern times--the reconstitution of the Russian polity and economy after more than seventy years of communist rule. This is the first book to look comprehensively and systematically at Russia's democratic transition at the local level. Its goal is to explain why some of the new political institutions in the Russian provinces weathered the monumental changes of the early 1990s better than others. Using newly available economic, political, and sociological data to test various theories of democratization and institutional performance, Stoner-Weiss finds that traditional theories are unable to explain variations in regional government performance in Russia.



Local Heroes argues that the legacy of the former economic system influenced the operation of new political institutions in important and often unexpected ways. Past institutional structures, specifically the concentration of the regional economy, promoted the formation of political and economic coalitions within a new proto-democratic institutional framework. These coalitions have had positive effects on governmental performance. For democratic theorists, this may be a surprising conclusion. However, it is possible, as Stoner-Weiss suggests, that the needs of democratic development may be different in the short run than in the long run. The "local heroes" of today may be impediments to the further development of democracy tomorrow. This provocative work, solidly grounded in research and theory, will interest anyone concerned with issues of economic and political transition.

* CHAPTER 1 *

Introduction

THIS STUDY addresses one of the most enduring problems of comparative politics: What are the necessary conditions for the creation of effective and responsive representative government? With the sudden rush to recast polities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the shape of liberal democracies, the issue of good government—an ancient theme of political philosophy—has gained new relevance. The collapse of the communist systems and their command administrations necessitated the creation of new public and economic institutions in both the center and the periphery. This rapid regime change provides social scientists with the still relatively rare opportunity to observe the birth of political institutions and to reexamine the effect of formal institutional change on political behavior.

The political and economic reform effort in the former Soviet Union, and Russia in particular, has been carried out according to the seemingly reasonable premise that changing institutions—or merely transplanting democratic and market institutions—will bring about (more or less) corresponding changes in political and economic practice. My argument demonstrates that although, to a certain degree, this premise is correct, reality is always much more complicated. The performance of new political institutions anywhere depends on the ground in which these institutions are planted. The message here, then, is simple: context matters. The more interesting questions, however, are how, why, and what aspects of context are most important?

In contrast to studies of institutional performance that have been conducted in established democracies, as for example Robert Putnam’s recent study of Italian regional government, this study focuses on a country in political, economic, and social turmoil.¹ Where the democracies of Western Europe benefited from the social, political, and economic effects of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment, Russia remained largely insulated from these crucial historical turning points. Russian representative government institutions were constructed in the virtual absence of any democratic tradition. Whereas the key to “making democracy work” in Putnam’s high-performance Italian regional governments was the presence of a civic community, Russia is a country recovering from more than seventy years of near-totalitarian rule and centuries of autocratic rule before that. As a result, Russian civil society is still stunted. Further, where other studies of democracy have noted the importance of markets to the quality of democratic governance, Russia in the 1990s was in the midst of constructing markets concurrently with the building of proto-democratic institutions—a dual transition, doubly difficult.

In the face of the challenges presented by Russia’s transition, I draw on the first experiment ever with representative government in the Russian provinces. In using transitional Russia as a case study, therefore, this book aims to further our understanding of institutional performance and, to a lesser degree, institutional development. Despite the rapidity and scope of Russia’s attempt to build democratic institutions from scratch, the factors that influence the performance of these new institutions should be of interest beyond the post-Soviet world. In short, what makes democracy work in provincial Russia should have implications for the building and functioning of representative government anywhere.

TRANSITIONAL RUSSIA

The post-Soviet world in the 1990s is in the throes of a massive economic and political transition. It is therefore fertile ground indeed for studies of institutional design and development. The first freely contested elections to national and regional legislatures took place in Russia in March 1990. In the Russian provinces, representative governments replaced the local Communist Party organs that Jerry Hough once called “a textbook example of the classic prefect in a modern setting.”² Whereas regional Communist Party leaders, as the effective heads of local government, had at most “a modest impact on policy,”³ after the 1990 elections the continued entropy of the Russian state forced the new Russian regional governments to take on fresh responsibilities and to face new challenges.⁴

In the face of the dramatic political, economic, and social changes in the early 1990s, however, many new governments in the Russian provinces appeared to be capable of little more than reacting to crisis after crisis. Others, though, were actually able to pursue policy objectives systematically and obtained higher degrees of constituent satisfaction for their efforts. When similar stimuli lead to different outcomes, the task of the social scientist is to understand why.⁵ This study is therefore concerned with explaining why some regional governments were seemingly better able to cope in the immediate aftermath of the volatile post-communist environment.

This project examines a crucial phase in Russia’s political development—what I will refer to as the First Republic.⁶ I consider the First Russian Republic to have existed from March 1990, with the multicandidate, competitive elections (at the national and local levels), until October 1993, when President Boris Yeltsin disbanded the Russian parliament and dissolved the local soviets. The Second Russian Republic began with the acceptance of the new constitution in December 1993 and the election of the reformed Russian parliament. Elections to smaller regional soviets, generally called dumas, began in December 1993 in Moscow and continued in the provinces throughout 1994.

The First Republic is a critical stage in Russia’s political development because it was Russia’s first real experience with representative government at the national and provincial levels. Further, in this brief time span, the elected local soviets grew from subservience to central authorities into increasingly powerful forces in Russian politics such that Yeltsin was sufficiently threatened by their growing authority to demand their dissolution and reelection. Finally, the patterns of institutional behavior established by these initial democratic experiments have set the course of future political and economic performance in the Russian provinces.

One cannot understate the importance of studying these first elected regional governments. Writing about pre-Revolutionary Russia, Frederick Starr noted, “The attitudes and institutions that define local government constitute a unique index to the mind and structure of the state as a whole.”⁷ This is no less true in the post-Soviet era. From 1990, power continued to devolve out to Russia’s provinces. The collapse of the powerful Soviet central ministries, and the passing of various pieces of enabling legislation, greatly increased the sphere of regional government activity from what it was under the old command administration system. Moreover, as a variety of Russian publications have pointed out, “the weakening of presidential and executive structures [at the center] did not mean that power flowed to the Russian legislature, but to the heads of the republics, oblasts, and krais.”⁸ As any Russian citizen knows, but Western scholars are only just discovering, “Moscow isn’t Russia.” If reform is ever to take a firm hold, it must catch on in the heartland.

Although the first regional government elections took place in Russia in March 1990, we still know very little about what regional governments actually did and even less about why some did (and continue to do) “better” than others. Aside from short policy studies in a single oblast, like Blair Ruble’s recent examination of housing policy in Yaroslavl’,⁹ other studies of the regional governments have mostly examined who won the 1990 (and to a lesser extent the 1993–94) provincial elections.¹⁰ Many of these analyses relied primarily on information regarding the new legislators’ attitudes and individual personal and professional backgrounds in order to arrive at a classification of the political complexions of regional soviets. From this, scholars attempted to infer the likely behavior of these governments—either pro-reform or anti-reform, “liberal” or “conservative.”

Although this work is important, it is only a beginning. Simply examining the backgrounds and views of regional legislators can lead to flawed explanations and predictions of who actually governed the Russian provinces. This is not only because of the significant changes in the structure of regional governments from 1990 (including the 1991 presidential appointment of heads of executives) but also because political complexion derived from the adage “where you sit determines where you stand” does not always provide an accurate guide to what governments actually do. Indeed, a great deal of evidence from other contexts indicates that performance is not necessarily determined entirely by partisanship or political complexion.¹¹

This study therefore advances Western scholarship on post-Soviet Russia to the next and more important question regarding what actions the newly elected oblast governments actually took. It asks: Given that all oblast soviets and administrations had essentially the same capabilities on paper, what accounts for rather significant differences in their performance? Why were some regional governments more capable than others of making sense out of the chaos that prevailed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s immediate collapse? In short, the study asks not only who governed these provinces in the first few years of representative political institutions, but also who governed them well and why.

This book is a testament to the diversity of provincial Russia. It is a journey through the Russian hinterland and offers a glimpse into the lives of people undergoing tumultuous change and into the institutions that govern them. Although this study does not travel to all eighty-nine territorial units of the Russian Federation, it stops in four provinces (or oblasti—generally referred to as oblasts in English) that are representative of “types” of Russian territories. The four regions are Nizhnii Novgorod, Tiumen’, Yaroslavl’, and Saratov. These four oblasts vary historically, geographically, economically, and politically. Although the performance of the new government institutions also varied considerably, regional government structures were identical.

Drawing from the comparative politics literature on institutional performance, the study employs a total of twelve indicators to compare the policy processes, policy output and implementation, and responsiveness to its constituents of each oblast government. These indicators form an aggregate performance index which demonstrates that some regional gove...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Political Economy of Government Performance
• Chapter 3: Decentralization and Democratization: The Development of Regional Government Institutions
• Chapter 4: Who Governs Russia Well? Measuring Institutional Performance
• Chapter 5: Testing Theories of Performance Variation: Economic, Social-Structural, and Cultural Hypotheses
• Chapter 6: The Political Economy of Government Performance: Testing the Theory
• Chapter 7: Democracy and the Market at Risk?
• Appendix A: Regional Government Structures
• Appendix B: Cross-Tabulations of Constituent Satisfaction with Regional Government by Urban and Rural Dwellers and by Levels of Education
• Bibliography
• Index