The Tail Wagging the Dog? Top-down and Bottom-up Explanations for Bureaucratic Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes

Russian Politics. 2018. Vol. 3. No. 2. P. 239–259.

Burkhardt F., Libman A.

The paper investigates the link between the sub-national variation of political regimes in a (at the federal level) non-democratic country and the appointments of federal officials in the sub-national provinces. In particular, we look at the appointment of the chief federal inspectors to the regions in Putin’s Russia in 2000–2012. Our main research question is whether appointment patterns can be explained by top-down concerns of the central government willing to keep control over the most unruly regions or by bottom-up self-selection of bureaucrats belonging to influential groups into more attractive positions more suitable for rent-seeking. The advantage of our case is that data we have at hand allow us to distinguish these two logics. Our results indicate that for the Russian chief federal inspectors in 2000–2012 bottom-up self-selection appears to be the more plausible explanation of the link between sub-national political regimes and appointment patterns.

Keywords: bureaucracy, authoritarianism, federalism, Russian politics, vertical of power, appointments, regional bureaucracy, sub-national regimes, Russian regions, siloviki

Publication based on the results of: Political Economy of Development: Mechanisms of Path-Dependence and Change (2018)