Skip to page navigation menu Skip entire header
Brown University
Skip 13 subheader links

Checking the Boss: Legislative Autonomy and Executive Contestation in the Russian Regions, 1992-2005

Description

Abstract:
Why do extremely similar sub-national polities exhibit divergent regime trajectories during democratization? Prevalent structural accounts of democracy, emphasizing the role of economic modernization, cannot account for the presence of dramatically different outcomes among polities at the same level of economic development that share a culture, history and macro-social setting. Formal institutional design, producing observable variation in the importance and role of regional legislature ultimately shapes the prospects of democratic consolidation. This dissertation argues that autonomous assemblies can effectively curtail the ambitions of domineering executives or, alternatively, rubber-stamp bodies can facilitate executive incumbent entrenchment.<br/><br/> Eligibility rules, the laws that govern who is allowed to serve on the assembly, condition the composition and autonomy of legislatures, which in turn affects executive contestation. These previously overlooked and seemingly minor details of institutional design help explain two important intermediate outcomes - which powerful local actors does a particular arrangement include or exclude from the legislature and how does it facilitate or hinder securing the loyalty of individual deputies from the perspective of the executive. Eligibility rules can be regarded as an institution in their own right, since they are stable and exhibit strong status-quo preserving characteristics due to the self-interested behavior of individual legislators.<br/><br/> The argument draws on four in-depth case studies based on a year of field research in the Russian Federation. Structured comparisons of two pairs of extremely similar Russian provinces (Novgorod-Pskov and Sverdlovsk-Perm') during the period 1992-2005 illustrate the successes and failures of executive attempts to subjugate the newly created legislatures. Additionally, an exploratory statistical study of contestation and legislative power in all eighty-nine Russian provinces based on a hierarchical model of elections nested within regions and encompassing all gubernatorial elections, provides evidence of the link between legislative autonomy and executive contestation beyond the four cases.<br/><br/>
Notes:
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2012)

Access Conditions

Rights
In Copyright
Restrictions on Use
Collection is open for research.

Citation

Bilev, Gavril K., "Checking the Boss: Legislative Autonomy and Executive Contestation in the Russian Regions, 1992-2005" (2012). Political Science Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0X065CQ

Relations

Collection: