Federalism and Regional Policy in Contemporary Russia by Andrey Starodubtsev

Author:Andrey Starodubtsev [Starodubtsev, Andrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317136149
Google: OhFFDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 37862966
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

In spite of this, both regional leaders and the deputies of the State Duma criticized the results of the commission’s work. The main point of criticism was the commission’s intention of dividing the reform into two phases. In the first phase, the commission would revise all responsibilities so as to distribute them among the governmental tiers, and in the second phase it would find enough financial resources for each of the levels to cover its expenditure assignments. The governors were concerned by the possibility of receiving additional responsibilities without gaining the appropriate financial resources. There were also many critical remarks about the assignment of particular responsibilities to federal, regional, or local governments. The governors were dissatisfied with the loss of responsibilities that had belonged to the regions during the 1990s, and the State Duma’s parliamentarians were worried about the significant decentralization of the social sphere of public administration.

Although lively parliamentary debates took place, the law initiated by Kozak was adopted. In fact, the reformers proposed to integrate these norms into the law devoted to general principles of arrangement of regional executives and legislatures in Russia. The history of this law is very interesting: it was adopted only in 1999 as a successful attempt by the center to unify the governmental systems in the regions. Before that, the subnational units had established different constitutional models depending on the structures of their internal political processes (Kononenko, 2003).

Of course, the regional elites actively defended their institutional choices. The center even had to appeal to the Constitutional Court to force certain regions to amend regional constitutions that included stipulations about appointing their governors by the legislature. This was an important symbolic act that meant that the distribution of responsibilities was a decision by the federal center that could be revised at the center’s discretion. Afterwards, the center frequently revised this part of the law. Moreover, the governors’ main fears were confirmed: the ongoing fiscal centralization led to the domination of federal transfers as the means of financing most of the new responsibilities.

This combination of administrative decentralization and fiscal centralization achieved the absolute dependency of the regional governments on the central one. Given the gradual reduction of political autonomy the president had been implementing since 2000, by 2005 the center had established a de facto unitary state with a very decentralized system of top-down government. I will demonstrate this model’s effects in detail in Chapter 3.

The next key question is what motivation inspired Vladimir Putin and his colleagues in the process of this strategy’s realization. Many studies of Putin’s reforms at the beginning of his presidency—both academic and non-academic—demonstrate that different kinds of reform were implemented by different teams of officials. All financial policy in the 2000s was controlled by Alexei Kudrin, a proponent of austerity measures. Administrative decentralization became the domain of Dmitry Kozak (the head of Kozak’s Commission, mentioned earlier). Finally, the political aspect of intergovernmental relations, including gubernatorial elections and their cancelation, was coordinated by Vladislav Surkov, the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration and the architect of competitive authoritarianism in Russia.

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