Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Note on Transliteration -- Local Heroes -- 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

Clearly Medvedev either cannot or will not diverge significantly from the path on which Putin set his country in 2000.

Do autocracies tend to govern better than democracies? Will a plainly authoritarian recasting of Russia's political system necessarily lead to a more capable state? Russia's president, Vladimir Putin would have us believe so, but recent events—not to mention the long arc of Russian and Soviet history—suggest a different answer. Putin's claims about what ails Russia are wrong. The culprit behind Russia's ungovernability is not the country's halting democracy but rather its weak, poorly institutionalized state. The best cure, moreover, is not authoritarianism— hard or soft —but rather an enhanced democracy, more deeply institutionalized than it ever was under Putin or his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

An exploration of territorial cleavages in Russia describes both successful accommodations & disastrous failures like Chechnia. The collapse of the Soviet Communist Party & the command economy which together maintained vertical control over the periphery was followed by unpredictable, conflicted, & confused relations between the central government & its territories. Although institutions responsible for managing territorial politics have proven to be weak, the Russian center has remained strong & has overcome various challenges to its authority. The struggle between the central government & the provinces during the period leading up to adoption of the Russian constitution is examined, along with failed attempts by Moscow to maintain control over the provinces via presidential representatives; the federative agreements of 1992; & varied treaties/agreements intended to clear up constitutional ambiguities. It is concluded that federalism has both contributed to the system's instability & provided the flexibility needed to accommodate Russia's widely diverse cleavages. Suggestions are made for institutional reforms that might improve the management of ethnic conflicts in post-Soviet Russia. 1 Table, 30 References. J. Lindroth

While Russian political parties appear to be institutionalizing to some degree at the national level, they are surprisingly absent at the regional level. This is a result of the dynamics of Russia's dual economic and political transition. Regional elites prefer a "partial reform equilibrium" in political institutional development so that they can avoid widening the sphere of accountability for their decisions in order to protect the gains they have made in the early stage of the economic transition. Strong political institutions—like competitive political parties that penetrate the periphery—would render transitional winners more broadly accountable to wider societal interests as well as to national political actors. The argument suggests that the territorial penetration and further institutionalization of Russia's party system are not necessarily inevitable. Under the conditions of dual, simultaneous economic and political transitions, elites may prefer an equilibrium of political underinstitutionalization to preserve their early winnings from the economic transition.