Europe-Asia Studies

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Exploring Varieties of Governance in Russia: In

Search of Theoretical Frameworks

Vladimir Gel’man & Margarita Zavadskaya

To cite this article: Vladimir Gel’man & Margarita Zavadskaya (2021) Exploring Varieties of
Governance in Russia: In Search of Theoretical Frameworks, Europe-Asia Studies, 73:6, 971-988,
DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1943317

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Published online: 09 Jul 2021.

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2021
Vol. 73, No. 6, July 2021, 971–988

Exploring Varieties of Governance in Russia:

In Search of Theoretical Frameworks

VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

IT IS A GIVEN THAT THE QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE MAKES a difference. It determines

the developmental trajectories of states and it influences the everyday lives of their citizens.
Why are some countries governed worse than others? In particular, why is contemporary
Russia governed so much worse than one would expect, judging by its degree of socio-
economic development? In comparative perspective, Russia is an example of a high-
capacity authoritarian state, which exhibits the major features of bad governance, such as
lack and/or perversion of the rule of law, rent-seeking, corruption, poor quality of state
regulation, widespread public funds abuse, and overall ineffectiveness of government
(Gel’man 2017, p. 498). These features have been demonstrated in numerous recent
assessments of Russia vis-à-vis other countries, conducted by various agencies. For
example, Russia ranked as 137th out of 180 countries in the 2019 Corruption Perception
Index.1 In 2020, the composite evaluation of the rule of law index by the World Justice
Project ranked Russia as 94th out of 128 countries.2 In the period 1996–2015, the average
indicator of corruption control in Russia, according to the World Bank, was −0.86 on a
scale from −2.5 (lowest possible grade) tо +2.5 (highest possible grade).3 This is why the
overall picture of patterns of governance in Russia remains rather gloomy even vis-à-vis
some of its post-Soviet neighbours (Zaostrovtsev 2017) and the BRICS countries (Taylor
2018, pp. 159–60). However, one should go beyond these statistics and address two more
basic questions: what are the sources and mechanisms of governance in Russia? Is bad
governance doomed to persist endlessly, or can the quality of governance be improved
over time by certain policies?
Francis Fukuyama has defined ‘governance’ as the ‘government’s ability to make and
enforce rules, and to deliver services, regardless as to whether that government is
democratic or not’ (Fukuyama 2013, p. 350). From this viewpoint, governance is
different from both state capacity, which is related to the state’s coercive and
infrastructural potential to conduct certain policies, and state autonomy, which is related

1
Corruption Perceptions Index 2019, Transparency International, available at: https://www.transparency.
org/cpi2019, accessed 5 June 2021.
2
Rule of Law Index 2020 (Washington, DC, World Justice Project), available at: https://
worldjusticeproject.org/sites/default/files/documents/WJP-ROLI-2020-Online_0.pdf, accessed 5 June 2021.
3
Worldwide Governance Indicators, 1996–2019 (Washington, DC, The World Bank), available at: http://
info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/, accessed 5 June 2021.

© 2021 University of Glasgow

https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1943317
972 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

to the ability of the state apparatus to adopt and implement policies irrespective of political
influence. Most existing theories of governance seek to explain the sources of good
governance—that is ‘trustworthy, reliable, impartial, un-corrupt and competent
government institutions’4—and the reasons for its failure. Although experts agree that
authoritarian states are often governed so poorly because of their predatory political
leaders who abuse their office for the sake of political survival (Bueno de Mesquita &
Smith 2011), there is a shortage of theoretical frameworks for studying effective and
efficient governance under non-democratic regimes. Most of the existing research
focuses on China, Singapore and, more rarely, on the states of the Persian Gulf
(Easterly 2014; Jones 2019), while largely overlooking post-Communist regimes, and
Russia specifically. In turn, many scholars of Russian studies seek answers to the
questions on the sources and mechanisms of governing the Russian state through the
lenses of various research perspectives. The diversity of competing explanations ranges
from the pernicious effects of historical legacies (Pipes 1974; Kotkin & Beissinger
2014) to the predatory behaviour of Putin and his entourage (Dawisha 2014; Åslund
2019). While the validity of these and other explanations is still the subject of many
discussions,5 less is known about the actual mechanisms of governing the Russian state,
especially with regard to actors and institutions that set up patterns of governance in
various sectors of the economy, regions, and policy fields. These issues remain under-
explored and under-theorised.
Meanwhile, the real practices of governance in post-Communist Russia are more
complex than one might consider judging by global indexes alone. In fact, the
developmental trajectory of the Russian state after the Soviet collapse remained very
uneven (Taylor 2015) and demonstrated varieties of governance: one observes numerous
instances of better-than-expected governance in various policy areas and geographical
locations. Certain policy reforms conducted in Russia in the early 2000s, which aimed at
increasing state capacity and state autonomy (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016), had a
positive impact on the Russian economy (Alexeev & Weber 2013), and some of them
have lasted for a long time in several policy fields (Easter 2012; Johnson 2016).
However, many good intentions and proposals to improve the quality of governance in
post-Communist Russia either failed completely, or were implemented partially,
inconsistently, and resulted in several unintended—and often even undesired—
consequences.
This introductory essay provides an overview of existing theoretical approaches to
studying the sources of good and bad governance under both democracies and
non-democracies with a view to developing a novel theoretical framework to
systematically explore contemporary Russian policies and explain varieties of governance
in Russia and beyond. After an examination of several comparative perspectives outlined
in the literature—both macro-level and meso-level approaches—we will reconsider their
explanatory power with regard to post-Communist Russia. Then, we will present our

4
Quality of Government Institute, Gothenburg, University of Gothenburg, available at: https://qog.pol.gu.
se/, accessed 5 June 2021.
5
For a critical overview, see Gel’man (2017).
 INTRODUCTION 973

framework for analysis built upon previous research (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016;
Gel’man 2017) and justify it based on the evidence from the other essays in this special
issue. Upon discussion of policy proposals and its limitations in contemporary Russia, an
agenda for further research of varieties of governance in Russia and beyond will be
discussed in the conclusion.

Explaining good and bad governance: lessons from previous research

Over recent decades, discussions on causal explanations of good and bad governance in
various countries, regions, and policy areas have been quite extensive among scholars of
political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology (Scott 1998; North et al. 2009;
Rothstein 2011; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012; Easterly 2014). Without any intention to
present a full-scale overview of these debates, we aimed at placing present-day Russia
onto the map of research on good and bad governance: how this country fits therein, and
how one can adjust the existing theories using empirical evidence from Russia? To what
extent do Russia’s historical and contemporary experiences reflect the general trends of
patterns of governance? If Russia’s trajectories of governance are different from what we
observe nowadays in various parts of the globe, should we consider Russia as an outlier
or, rather, as a laggard vis-à-vis many other developed states and nations? Furthermore,
given within-country variations of patterns of governance across regions, cities, and
policy areas in Russia (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016),6 what do these variations tell us
about the logic of good and bad governance under conditions of electoral authoritarian
regimes?
The existing scholarship of patterns of governance is rather diverse, and pays attention to
different causal mechanisms that, in turn, are based upon the impact of politico-economic,
societal, and cultural factors. At the macro-level of analysis there are several major
research perspectives. The powerful institutionalist approach, which predominates in
political economy literature, focuses on the decisive influence of overarching institutional
settings, such as the long-term impact of ‘extractive’ or ‘inclusive’ institutions (Acemoglu
& Robinson 2012) or the impact of prevailing ‘limited’ or ‘open’ access order (North
et al. 2009) on patterns of governance. These orders and/or institutions, which emerged
historically in various contexts, may persist for decades or even centuries, determine
patterns of political competition and accountability (or lack thereof), and provide major
arrangements for good and bad governance over the long run. Yet another powerful
macro-level societal approach tends to emphasise the major impact of social capital
(Putnam 1993), social embeddedness (Migdal 1988), and personal networks (Braithwaite
& Levi 1998). This approach, in turn, affects the degree of interpersonal and institutional
trust (Rothstein 2011) as major essential components of the quality of governance. At the
same time, the dark side of social capital—including clientelism (Hicken 2011),
patronalism (Hale 2015), and ‘amoral familism’ (Banfield 1958) inter alia—provide
fertile grounds for the long-term persistence of bad governance.

6
See also the essay authored by Margarita Zavadskaya and Lev Shilov in this special issue.
974 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

The validity of these arguments was proved in several influential studies, both
contemporary and historical (Putnam 1993; Greif 2006; Rothstein 2011), thus
encouraging scholars of governance in Russia to follow these frameworks as major
guidelines. Overall, however, there is a dismal consensus among specialists, who perceive
bad governance in Russia as a long-term pattern, which emerged in the Soviet period of
Russian history (if not earlier) and persists over time. Depending upon the focus of
analyses, experts attribute the roots of bad governance in Russia to side effects of
negative legacies of informality (sistema) (Ledeneva 2013) and of ‘patronal politics’,
which tend to reproduce ‘single power pyramids’ in Russia and post-Soviet Eurasia (Hale
2015). Some critically minded observers even argued, perhaps deterministically, that there
is an unescapable ‘matrix’ of path-dependency (Hedlund 2005) and a deeply embedded
patrimonial rule in Russia. At best, scholars express some hope for the long-term effects
of economic growth, which, alongside generational changes, may lay down favourable
conditions for improving quality of governance in Russia some decades (if not centuries)
from now (Hale 2015; Treisman 2015).
While the scholarly value of some macro-level approaches is beyond the scope of our
discussions, their practical use as tools for analysis of patterns of ‘here and now’
governance is not so straightforward. Firstly, their focus is mostly structure-induced rather
than agency-centred. However, the exclusive reliance upon structural approaches and their
path-dependent arguments tends to explain continuity rather than change, and this focus
may only reinforce the existing dismal consensus among scholars instead of searching for
new explanations. Secondly, institutionalists and followers of a societal approach mostly
concentrated on long-term processes rather than on the effects of short- and medium-term
political and policy dynamics. Meanwhile, the empirical analysis of changing patterns of
governance in post-Soviet Russia required a more in-depth understanding of the
mechanisms and drivers of changes in different policy fields (Easter 2012; Johnson 2016;
Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016) and territories (Buckley & Reuter 2019; Yakovlev et al.
2020). Therefore, some meso-level analytic frameworks may add a welcomed
complementarity in scholarly explanations and help the fine-tuning of macro-level
theoretical approaches to the study of governance. In particular, the research of
interconnections between patterns of governance and varieties of political regimes
(Charron & Lapuente 2010), including those in post-Soviet Eurasia (Melville &
Mironyuk 2016), demonstrated a conditional impact of democracy and authoritarianism
on the quality of governance, although it tells us little about causal mechanisms of these
phenomena, as well as about their policy implications. In a similar vein, an analysis of
mechanisms of policy-making and of incentives for good and bad governance in various
types of non-democratic regimes, such as paired comparisons between authoritarianisms
in Russia and in China (Rochlitz et al. 2015; Libman & Rochlitz 2019; Remington 2019)
is very useful for exploring variations of governance in a comparative perspective.
Such a shift of scholarly focus away from structural lenses of longue durée and bridging
macro- and meso-level approaches may pave the way to bringing actors back in analyses of
patterns of governance. The research of the effects of political leadership (Besley et al. 2011)
and of policy ideas (Blyth 2013; Easterly 2014) in changing patterns of governance are
important agency-centred additions for an analysis. Regarding Russia and its post-
Communist neighbours, these factors contributed greatly to certain policy advancements
 INTRODUCTION 975

(Alexeev & Weber 2013; Johnson 2016) yet their consequences are often unintended and
even undesired (Taylor 2014). Judging from an agency-centred perspective, we may
reconsider even the effects of various legacies of the past, which are largely perceived as
long-term obstacles for good governance in Russia and beyond (Kotkin & Beissinger
2014). Scholars may pay more attention to the causal mechanisms of the translation of
these legacies into the political and policy agenda for today and tomorrow. One might
argue that various legacies of the past affect the present and the future mostly because of
the means by which they are transferred. For Russia, the intentional use of Soviet
institutions and practices as a set of building blocks for institution-building and
mechanisms of governance greatly contributed to the maintenance of bad governance.
Examples include the transformation of government structure after the Soviet collapse in
terms of performance of the state apparatus (Huskey 2014), and practices of control and
monitoring in law enforcement agencies (Taylor 2014), thus contributing to the use (and
to the abuse) of the state agencies and coercive apparatus of post-Soviet states as
instruments of Russia’s political regime. The construction of these legacies gave birth to
the new normative ideal, which could be roughly labelled a ‘good Soviet Union’
(Gel’man 2017), and the basis for a ‘mental model’ (Denzau & North 1994) aimed at
preservation of bad governance in Russia.
In turn, some of the agency-centred approaches to patterns of governance in Russia may
be regarded as excessively shallow. Sometimes, they tend to portray politico-economic
changes as a Manichean struggle between technocratic policy reformers (crusaders of
good governance) and rent-seekers (defenders of bad governance) and blame the latter
group of actors for the building of ‘kleptocracy’ (Dawisha 2014), and the establishment
of ‘crony capitalism’ (Åslund 2019) if not ‘mafia states’ (Magyar 2016). While the
factual grounds for such a criticism are often correct, explanations of this kind are often
insufficient. In the political realm, most actors are neither good nor bad so far as their
moral qualities. The same political actors may endorse policy reforms aimed at
improvement of quality of governance or adopt measures that may have devastating
effects on governance—Vladimir Putin might be considered as a prime example of that
(Easter 2012; Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016; Åslund 2019). Technocratic policy
reformers often make controversial contributions to the quality of governance (Easterly
2014), and the case of post-Communist Russia is not exceptional (Gel’man 2018). After
all, political and policy actors in Russia and elsewhere pursue their own self-interests, but
it would be rather unfair to replace an analysis of their motivations and strategies by ad
hoc invectives addressed to certain persons and organisations.
To summarise, the mosaic picture of scholarly approaches to the quality of governance in
Russia is rather incoherent and controversial. Macro-level approaches with their emphasis
on the pernicious long-term effects of legacies, orders, and institutions, inherited from the
past, albeit useful, are not sensitive enough to current trends of quality of governance
amid ongoing changes. Meso-level approaches that deal with features of political regimes
and configurations of actors, have offered more nuanced and focused explanations of
varieties of governance yet have not always produced systematic explanations of the
changing landscape of governance in Russia in a comparative perspective. Thus, there is
a scholarly need for developing new frameworks to analyse the varieties of governance in
Russia and beyond. As the first step towards this direction, we will elaborate arguments
976 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

on linkages between macro- and meso-factors of quality of governance in contemporary

Russia in order to uncover causal mechanisms of emergence and persistence of good and
bad governance, as well as the implications of these arguments for further research.

Uncovering mechanisms of governance in Russia: institutions and incentives

Perhaps, the best description of the emergence of bad governance was provided not by a
social scientist but by a novelist. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is worth reading as
a classic example of the making of bad governance, in this case on an uninhabited island
by a community of teenagers. According to Golding’s plot, the trajectory of governance
on this island went from a failed attempt to build a democracy, through a short-lived
informal oligarchy, to a seizure of power by the most brazen teenager, who excluded his
rivals from the community, reshuffled a coalition of his followers, and established a
repressive tyranny, which resulted in a catastrophe. In the novel, the encroachment of
external actors (namely, navy officers) put an end to this trajectory, but in real life, the
catastrophe of bad governance could continue virtually forever. One should admit,
however, that Golding’s characters were not doomed to bad governance because of
unfavourable structural factors (such as historical legacies): they were just ordinary
teenagers, left to their own devices. The major lesson of Lord of the Flies for political
scientists is that bad governance is a natural logical outcome of the power maximisation
drive of successful brazen politicians who face insufficient constraints to their aspirations.
Later on, this argument was reformulated by leading scholars of authoritarianism, who
claimed that bad governance is typically the best politics for dictators all over the globe
(Bueno de Mesquita & Smith 2011).
In essence, if any ruler in any country encounters little or no constraints, bad governance
becomes a norm, while good governance remains an exception (Gel’man 2017, p. 502).
When the time horizons of rulers are short, they tend to follow the path of a ‘roving
bandit’, as depicted by Olson (1993), exhausting available resources without investing in
the future. By contrast, good governance does not emerge by default because of the good
will of prudent and visionary leaders and/or experts (Easterly 2014) but is developed in a
response to major domestic and international challenges. Historically, these challenges
emerge as effects of international rivalry in the form of major wars and conflicts and/or
from domestic political pressure driven by competing segments of elites and by society at
large (Tilly 1992; North et al. 2009). Rulers need to improve the quality of governance to
mitigate the risks of foreign conquest of their countries or domestic power loss through
revolutions and civil wars. Nowadays, however, these risks are not as high as they were
in the past, thus offering authoritarian rulers more freedom in developing various
mechanisms of governance. This is especially true of Russia’s rulers in the early twenty-
first century: they faced relatively weak constraints on their political and policy choices in
comparison with counterparts in many democracies and even non-democracies (Gel’man
2015; Taylor 2018). Still, not all modern autocracies necessarily resulted in
comprehensive bad governance, although examples of authoritarian good governance are
relatively rare. These symptoms may be summarised by a bitter statement: ‘for every
President Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore there are many like President Mobutu Sese Seko
of Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo)’ (Rodrik 2010).
 INTRODUCTION 977

From this perspective, present-day Russia resembles neither Singapore nor Congo. Russia’s
authorities pursue ambitious developmental goals in various policy areas and promote a few
state-directed programmes and projects addressed, inter alia, to improvement of the quality
of governance. Their list included state-driven digitalisation initiatives (see Gritsenko &
Indukaev in this issue), developmental projects in the Russian Far East (see Libman &
Yakovlev in this issue) and urban development projects, including a large-scale housing
renovation programme in the city of Moscow (see Khmelnitskaya & Ihalainen in this
issue). The results of these initiatives were mixed (Dmitriev 2016). At best, their
implementation was very costly and did not result in major changes of the quality of
governance: corruption and rent-seeking are so entrenched as the core principles of
governing the Russian state (Gel’man 2017) that major improvements of quality of
governance without major political changes and leadership changes become increasingly
difficult over time. These two tendencies, however, are not mutually exclusive, and they
provide controversial incentives to all layers of the hierarchy of governance, which is
known in Russian political slang as the ‘power vertical’. State and municipal officials,
directors of state-owned enterprises, university rectors, officers of law enforcement
agencies, and their numerous subordinates in Russia (including university lecturers and
school teachers) encounter opportunities and constraints for both good and bad governance,
provided by both formal and informal institutions in a changing environment.
What are the incentives for good and bad governance in contemporary Russia? In our
view, the contemporary Russian state has failed to produce sufficient positive incentives
for good governance for several reasons. First and foremost, given their widespread
suspicion of rent-seeking and of the corrupt behaviour of their subordinates, top-level
officials assume—nearly by default—that, without strict control, the lower layers of the
‘power vertical’ have no incentives for performance improvement (Gel’man 2016,
p. 464). Thus, top state officials tend to constrain these tendencies via extensive
regulations and top-down control of their agents, in spite of the logic of ‘high
modernism’, so heavily criticised in the literature (Scott 1998). Therefore, institutional
frameworks, set up by countless laws, decrees, and instructions, have contributed to the
phenomenon of an ‘over-regulated state’ (Paneyakh 2013), which combines a very high
density of state regulations with their poor quality and sweeping discretion of regulatory
agencies and state watchdogs. Some observers have argued that these features of state
regulations are often designed intentionally, to satisfy the rent-seeking aspirations of
special interest groups, including state bureaucrats themselves (Aleksashenko 2018;
Åslund 2019). In a broader sense, state regulations serve as substitutes for other
mechanisms of accountability in the absence of electoral democracy, separation of power,
and the rule of law, and against the background of the notorious weakness of independent
media, professional communities, and self-regulation mechanisms (Petrov et al. 2014).
Under these conditions, the ‘over-regulated’ state relied upon ‘police patrol’ practices of
excessive oversight and monitoring provided by numerous state watchdog agencies,
instead of opting for ‘fire alarm’ mechanisms, which merely rely upon self-regulation in
both state-owned and private organisations (McCubbins & Schwartz 1984).
No wonder that these practices were not only very costly in terms of resources and agency
costs but they also contributed to further aggravation of principal–agent problems. The
problem is that mechanisms of ‘manual control’ cannot work effectively: systematic
978 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

observations of complex organisations and their regular evaluation by state officials are
hardly possible in this way. Therefore, the top layers of the ‘power vertical’ are forced to
rely upon a limited number of easily quantifiable indicators, which serve as targets for
subordinates. In turn, the lower layers of the ‘power vertical’ consider these targets as the
major (if not the only) criteria of their performance; as a result, their activities aim at
achievement of these goals at any costs. Empirical analyses of practices of different law
enforcement agencies in Russia (Paneyakh 2014; Paneyakh et al. 2018) convincingly
demonstrated how these incentives contributed to major pathologies in the behaviour of
Russian officials. Police officers, prosecutors, and judges respond to top-down incentives
via misreporting and production of many biases, instead of the improvement of
combating crime in the country.7 Similar regulatory practices are outlined in this issue by
Mikhail Sokolov’s critical analysis of institutional regulations in Russian academia. He
directly claims that the genesis of these regulations is caused by the strong conviction of
top state officials of the alleged poor performance of their academic subordinates without
strict and comprehensive oversight. Moreover, as watchdog agencies themselves pursue
slack maximisation in their job, then the quality of top-down control and monitoring in
Russia tends to decline over time, as Katerina Guba and Angelika Tsivinskaya argue in
their study of state evaluation of educational institutions. They point out that the
professional performance of evaluators, or experts in charge of assessment of
organisations under control, is below the standards set up by Russian academia, and the
output of their expertise proved to be unsatisfactory.
The second reason for the failure of incentives for good governance lies in the electoral
nature of Russian authoritarianism, which is heavily dependent upon the political rather than
the economic performance of the ‘power vertical’. Not only is the performance of state
authorities at the regional level judged by election results and not by socio-economic
achievements (Reuter & Robertson 2012; Buckley & Reuter 2019), but also state (and to
a lesser degree, private) enterprises and organisations perform functions of workplace
electoral mobilisation for the sake of the Kremlin and its sub-national agents (Frye et al.
2014). More recently, the mechanism of accountability within the ‘power vertical’, based
upon prioritisation of certain political indicators (such as degree of popular trust in the
president in each region for regional governors), was officially institutionalised in Russia
(Shcherbak 2019). Such a prioritisation undermines incentives for good governance. The
study of the provision of local public goods carried out by Margarita Zavadskaya and Lev
Shilov demonstrates this logic: using the data from Russian municipalities, they found an
ambiguous effect of voting for United Russia on the quality of local governance. Local
officials prefer to concentrate on easier and more visible tasks such as mending local
roads, instead of engaging in more challenging services such as dealing with dilapidated
housing. In other words, delivery of votes instead of delivery of local public goods is the
more important task for Russian local governments. By contrast, the hegemonic
authoritarian regime in China, which is not dependent upon elections at all, judges

7
In a way, these mechanisms of top-down hierarchical control and responses of officials to the pressure of
their superiors in present-day Russia are not so dissimilar to practices of misreporting in the Soviet planned
economy, as analysed by historians (Harrison 2011).
 INTRODUCTION 979

provincial Communist party secretaries mostly by their socio-economic performance, thus

providing their sub-national subordinates with rather different incentives such as
promotion of good governance via offering career advancement opportunities for
successful regional leaders (Rochlitz et al. 2015; Libman & Rochlitz 2019). In a broader
sense, placing political loyalty above professional efficiency in governing the country
serves as an Achilles heel for several authoritarian regimes (Egorov & Sonin 2011), and
Russia is highly vulnerable in this respect.
Thirdly, the focus on building of many regulatory barriers as ‘sticks’ against the spread of bad
governance coincided with a major shortage of ‘carrots’, or positive incentives for good
governance in Russia. A heavy regulatory burden and permanent risks of punishment for real
or imagined legal violations, especially given the increasing scope of repressions against elites
(Rogov 2018), put mid-range officials of the ‘power vertical’ in an awkward position. They
have been faced with limited incentives for policy entrepreneurship, which is aimed at
improvement of institutional performance, and may prefer preservation of the status quo as an
instrument to avert these risks. Sometimes, as Aleksey Gilev and Darya Dimke show in their
study, local officials even find creative ways of circumventing state regulations to resolve
certain issues in respective municipalities—otherwise, rigid state regulations will contribute to
further decline of local governance. Municipal authorities have little or no financial autonomy
and discretion in allocating funds to provide any services as most of the funds come from the
regional level for very specific purposes. The latter makes municipalities serve as operators of
regional and federal grants, rather than independent political entities.
The excessive use of ‘sticks’ rather than ‘carrots’ may close the path to improvement of
institutional performance, especially if and when incentives for good governance prove to be
short-term and unsustainable. In his analysis, Vladimir Gel’man underlines the primary role
of political patronage for the ‘success stories’ of major developmental projects in Russia.
However, these patron–client linkages as well as priorities of political leadership are often
insufficient for long-term advancements of state-directed projects and programmes. While
positive incentives—such as strong reputations, official rewards, opportunities for upward
career mobility—may be not efficient enough for the promotion of good governance, the
lack of open and fair competition between agents for better performance only increased
arbitrariness in evaluations within the ‘power vertical’, thus aggravating principal–agent
problems. To put it bluntly, the number of ‘carrots’ is very limited, and they are not juicy
enough, while the ‘stick’ is always in the principal’s hands and can be used at any time.
Given this constellation, initiatives for deviations from the status quo are risky for
subordinates of the ‘power vertical’. One may argue, however, that it is hard to expect a
systematic cultivation of long-term incentives for policy entrepreneurship and for
promotion of good governance in Russia, because its top leadership tend to behave like
Olson’s ‘roving bandits’ (Olson 1993) and to transfer these patterns of behaviour onto
lower layers of the ‘power vertical’.
This difficult constellation of meso-level institutional factors, which contribute to
persistence and further deepening of bad governance in Russia, is: (1) building an ‘over-
regulated state’ with top-down comprehensive control as a major tool for governing the
Russian state; (2) prioritising loyalty over efficiency, while focusing on political rather
than economic performance by Russia’s political leadership; and (3) reinforcing the
predominance of negative incentives within the ‘power vertical’ hierarchy.
980 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

These conditions have remained stable throughout the twenty-first century. Such a
constellation diminished the chances for advancement of good governance in Russia. Yet,
even within the constraints introduced by these meso-level factors, manifestations of
varieties of governance in Russia are still rather diverse in various sectors, regions, and
localities. This diversity may be better explained by a number of micro-level factors, such
as complexity of policy-making, quality of leadership, degree of pressure from various
interest groups (including not only economic agents, but also civil society actors), and
sensitiveness of policy outcomes for the dynamics of public opinion. For example,
governance of fiscal and monetary policy in Russia and conduct of policy reforms
remained rather efficient over the last two decades (Appel 2011; Johnson 2016). In these
sectors, key decisions are elaborated and implemented by a tiny group of well-qualified
technocrats under strong political patronage, and financial and macroeconomic stability as
such is a major priority of Russia’s top leadership (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016;
Aleksashenko 2018). By contrast, social policies in Russia are largely decentralised, not
considered a top priority of the political leadership, and their conduct as well as micro-
management heavily depends upon a constellation of actors and their influence both
nationally and sub-nationally, while the engagement of societal actors in this domain is
still sporadic and poorly organised (Wengle & Rasell 2008; Cook et al. 2019). In a
similar way, the comparison between effects of leadership in two large Russian state-
owned companies, Sberbank and Russian Railways, made by Gel’man in this collection,
reveals a similar trend. The efforts of Sberbank CEO German Gref greatly improved the
performance of the biggest Russian bank, while the efforts of his counterpart from
Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, turned the biggest Russian rail operator into his
own fiefdom, aimed at privatising of gains and socialising of costs.
In a broader perspective, a diversity in policy priorities, resource endowments amid
peculiarities of governance, and policy-making in different sectors greatly affects the
mechanisms of governance, and their effects may be controversial in terms of providing
incentives for good and bad governance. Actors in charge of policy implementation (city
mayors, university rectors, directors of enterprises) may get signals for the encouragement
of policy entrepreneurship or just for continuity of rent-seeking and corruption, or even
deepening thereof. The question is the following: is there any chance to advance existing
practices of good governance in Russia under its current political regime, or, rather, is
this mission impossible without major regime changes?

Countering bad governance in Russia: imperfect recipes

Russia’s top leaders are aware of the problems with its quality of governance and have often
raised this issue at the forefront of their agenda. They have offered several recipes for
improving the quality of governance in Russia, which may be summarised as a
combination of 3Ds—deregulation, digitalisation, and decentralisation. However, these
recipes and their actual implementation do sound like imperfect approaches to countering
bad governance in Russia.
Deregulation as an instrument for the improvement of quality of governance in Russia is
vigorously advocated by liberal economists (Åslund et al. 2010). The problem, however, is
two-fold. Firstly, despite the loud rhetoric of state officials, who called for a ‘regulatory
 INTRODUCTION 981

guillotine’ (Yashunskii 2019), the outcomes of many revisions of numerous by-laws and
governmental decrees are selective, partial, and insignificant: entrenched bureaucrats and
special interest groups have little incentives to revise the existing status quo. In terms of
policy reforms, the ‘insulation’ of Russian government from the influence of societal
actors, cultivated in Russia since the early 2000s (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016;
Grigoriev & Dekalchuk 2017) demonstrated its dark side. Major policy changes, albeit
necessary, can be conducted only by those state actors who pursue their own self-interest,
and may deliver unintended policy outcomes.8 For example, it is hard to expect that
deregulation in the Russian academia will be effectively conducted by the same actors
who previously contributed to its over-regulation (see Sokolov in this issue) and imposed
dubious practices of evaluation (see Guba & Tsivinskaya in this issue). Moreover, as
deregulation remains a matter of discretion of the regulators themselves, these efforts may
even result in some perverse effects such as ‘regulatory capture’ (Stigler 1971). The
experience of Russian Railways, which almost unilaterally imposed high tariffs for
commuter services onto the shoulders of regional budgets being endorsed by the Russian
government (Gel’man 2016, pp. 456–57), is very telling in this respect. Secondly,
deregulation at best can reduce risks for policy entrepreneurship, provided nowadays by
negative incentives within the ‘power vertical’. However, it cannot as such provide
positive incentives for the improvement of the quality of governance given the
prioritisation of loyalty over efficiency and the lack of transparent meritocratic
mechanisms for rewards and career advancements within the Russian state.
In the mid-2010s, digitalisation became a new catchword among Russian state officials
and technocratic experts. The advancement of algorithmic governance is widely perceived
as a mechanism of constraining rent-seeking aspirations of special interest groups, and of
improvement of the effectiveness of government. Furthermore, techno-optimists, such as
German Gref, considered online platforms as an instrument of accountability, which may
serve as a viable alternative both to the ‘power vertical’ and to representative democracy
(Gel’man 2018). The evidence, however, is far from these optimistic expectations. On the
one hand, against the background of isolationist trends in Russian politics and the
obsession of Russia’s leadership with threats to sovereignty, digitalisation faces numerous
political constraints, which contributed to many attempts at the ‘nationalization of
Russian Internet’ (Pallin 2017). On the other hand, the government is not able to resist
special interest groups, which tend to adjust algorithmic governance to serve their own
purposes. Andrei Isaev, an influential State Duma member from United Russia,
summarised the essence of such an approach. He openly stated to journalists in August
2019: ‘ … if you, an official, come to an internet company to resolve a concrete issue, and
he (its representative) responded: “hey, there is an algorithm, and I can’t change
anything”, then you should request him to change an algorithm’ (Shamardina 2019). As
one can see, this approach is hardly compatible with ideas of effectiveness and
impartiality promoted by crusaders of digitalisation.
The effects of politically driven digitalisation were heavily criticised in the aftermath of
the September 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, when in one of the single-mandate

8
On the case of police reforms, see Taylor (2014).
982 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

districts electronic voting via a web portal contributed to the shift of final outcome. In the
offline mode of voting, the independent candidate Roman Yuneman won with a solid
margin over his major opponent, university rector Margarita Rusetskaya, who was openly
endorsed by the city hall. Yet, online voting brought quite opposite results: Rusetskaya
won a landslide majority when votes were counted via the web and, in the end, she won a
seat in the legislature. Meanwhile, the web portal was hacked, and faced many technical
glitches, so the integrity of online voting has been questioned by election observers
(Vasil’chuk 2019). Similarly, Daria Gritsenko and Andrey Indukaev analyse in their essay
opportunities and constraints of Russia’s ‘digital governance’ model, using evidence from
the Moscow-based project, Active Citizen, which was developed by the city government
as an instrument of communication with Muscovites. Drawing on a mixed-methods
approach, the authors claim that, despite their noticeable success in aggregating citizens’
requests, online platforms still constrain citizens’ empowerment as advanced digital tools
are used in limited policy domains, certain types of participation, and they still affect
agenda-setting. Even though the effects of digitalisation in Russia and beyond may have
less salient political connotations, the fundamental problem remains the same: algorithms
and online services can improve the quality of governance only if these mechanisms are
complementary to an impartial and effective offline good governance, but not if they are
aimed at substituting for it.
Decentralisation remains the most problematic part of the current agenda for the
improvement of the quality of governance in Russia. These problems are related to the
consequences of the major political, economic, and administrative recentralisation that
Russia underwent in the 2000s (Starodubtsev 2018). Following this turn, the autonomy of
most Russian regions and localities has been greatly reduced, as they have become
heavily dependent on the central government. This is why many projects and programmes
aimed at the advancement of regional socio-economic development are almost doomed to
be very centralised. Alexander Libman and Andrey Yakovlev demonstrate the limits of
this centralised approach in their research on the performance of a newly established
ministry in charge of the development of the Russian Far East. Despite the strategic
importance of this region—especially in the wake of Russia’s geopolitical ‘turn to the
East’ (Blakkisrud & Rowe 2018)—and the need for a major inflow of resources into the
Far East due to the urgent demographic, infrastructural, and other problems, the positive
effects of these efforts by the federal government remains limited, to say the least. One of
the temporary solutions is the creation of specialised policy and geographical areas that
enjoy preferential treatment and a certain degree of decentralisation and deregulation
granted by the central authorities. However, the major challenge policy-makers encounter
is a trade-off between sufficient local knowledge and a capacity to lobby the Far East
ministry’s interests efficiently in the federal centre. An uneasy balance, and indeed actual
policy success heavily depends on not only personal style and connections, but also the
political priorities of the central government. Policy stability and continuity under
personalist autocracies are threatened since international and domestic priorities may
change any time depending on the autocrat’s will, as happened in 2014 after the
annexation of Crimea.
Given the consequences of recentralisation amid Russia’s sluggish economic growth in
the 2010s, only a handful of Russia’s relatively wealthy regions, being not so dependent
 INTRODUCTION 983

upon federal funding and driven by proactive leadership, may afford their own large-scale
development programmes and major innovation projects.9 The housing renovation
programme in the city of Moscow may be considered as one of the few showcase
examples of ambitions ventures; it was aimed at resolving the housing problem for many
Muscovites and the promotion of the gentrification of urban areas in the Russian
capital. Still, as Marina Khmelnitskaya and Emmirosa Ihalainen stress in their essay,
this programme faced major problems due to the dominance of special interests,
non-transparency, and political caveats of the Moscow city government. The Moscow
renovation programme offers an example of how different institutional and participatory
formats are used to accommodate the variety of business and bureaucratic interests. The
results of a detailed qualitative analysis following a historical institutionalist approach
reveal that the current renovation programme stems from the ‘layering’ of previous
policies and, against common interpretation, actually considers several city interests
through extensive consulting. At the same time, accountability and the participation of
local communities have been largely ignored, inasmuch as they have been taken into
account only after successful collective action. Thus, the main findings are in line with
the research arguing that participation can be efficiently exploited under authoritarian
governance, it differs from a mere ‘descriptive’ representation and, indeed, allowed for
partial accounting of Muscovites’ preferences. If in Moscow, with its plentiful financial
resources and a relatively high degree of autonomy for the city government, the quality of
government serves as an obstacle for successful development, it is no surprise that these
problems are more severe in many not so wealthy municipalities. The essays authored by
Margarita Zavadskaya and Lev Shilov, and Aleksei Gilev and Daria Dimke in this special
issue provide strong evidence for that assertion.
What about the bottom-up influence on sub-national governance from the mass public?
Most recently, the Russian government actively promoted in various localities projects on
participatory budgeting and other forms of public engagement. While critical observers
dubbed these tendencies ‘participatory authoritarianism’ (Owen & Bindman 2019),
promoters of participatory budgeting in Russia argued that even small-scale local funding
caused certain grass-roots enthusiasm and offered local activists new opportunities for
improvement of their communities on the basis of joint responsibility of municipalities
and local citizenry (Shulga et al. 2019). However, the essay authored by Leonid
Polishchuk, Alexander Rubin, and Igor Shagalov formulates a sceptical assessment of
public participation in local governance. An empirical analysis of territorial self-
management (territorial’noe obshchestvennoe samoupravlenie) based on the unique data
in the city of Kirov reveals major problems with the role of the local public in urban
policy-making. If under a democratic set-up, public goods co-production results from the
joint efforts of local government and civil groups, the paradox of civic activism and self-
management under non-democratic and non-transparent rule is that, even if successful,
the lion’s share of the public goods production costs are shifted to the local communities.
In other words, local communities provide better governance than local governments,
thereby decreasing political pressure on the state and municipalities. These controversies

9
On Tatarstan, see Yakovlev et al. (2020).
984 VLADIMIR GEL’MAN & MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA

may reflect a more fundamental issue of grass-root mass participation in the absence of local
(as well as of nation-wide) democracy: public engagement may promote good governance
only by being complementary to electoral accountability and separation of power at the
local level, but not being substitutive to them.
The 4D solution, which may go beyond recipes of deregulation, digitalisation, and
decentralisation and put political democratisation as the No.1 item on the agenda of
advancement of good governance in Russia, remains beyond the current menu of Russian
authoritarianism. Therefore, all other recipes for countering bad governance in the
country may be considered at best as partial and temporary solutions. Yet, even a possible
democratisation of Russia’s political regime and the following full-scale revision of its
politico-economic order as such cannot guarantee a diminishment of bad governance in
the country, as the recent experience of Ukraine after an overthrow of Yanukovych
suggests (Gel’man 2017). Still, without major political changes there is no way to
improve the quality of governance in Russia. Under the current conditions of electoral
authoritarianism and crony capitalism, Russia is likely to be doomed to muddling through
numerous pathologies of bad governance, while preserving certain ‘pockets of efficiency’
in strategically important priority sectors and policy fields (Gel’man & Starodubtsev
2016)10 and selectively picking up good apples fallen from the bad trees of
ineffectiveness and unrule of law. The question is to what extent these pathologies could
turn into chronic deceases, not curable under any treatment, or will the ‘vicious circle’ of
bad governance in Russia be broken in the foreseeable future.

Concluding remarks: an agenda for the future

What are the lessons that might be learned from the analyses of the experience of good and
bad governance in contemporary Russia? To what extent is Russia’s experience country-
specific and context-bounded? Does it reflect more general problems of the quality of
governance in high-capacity authoritarian states? Evidence, as presented in the essays in
this special issue, does tell us about certain issues for further research on good and bad
governance in Russia and beyond. So far, there is evidence that islands of ‘good’
governance may exist under authoritarianism. However, their existence is constrained by,
firstly, personalism that results in higher uncertainty, lack of balanced decision-making,
and policy continuity; secondly, a constant necessity to uphold policy endeavours by
ensuring reliable patronage in the federal centre; and thirdly, an uneasy balance between
co-optation, limited consultation, and avoiding genuine political competition. Under these
conditions, the risks of political entrepreneurship are significantly higher, so that personal
guarantees and informal deals play a crucial role in creating ‘pockets of efficiency’ in
authoritarian states, given the lack of established and self-enforcing institutions.
Meanwhile, these explanations are far from being exhaustive, and there are still prospects
for future research in the realm of governance in Russia and under authoritarian rule in
general. First of all, there is a need for a more systematic comparison across the levels of
governance and policy areas. Most of the studies presented in this issue focus on specific

10
See also Gel’man in this collection.
 INTRODUCTION 985

policy areas such as housing, municipal governance, or digitalisation, while broader

comparisons will provide us with a larger picture across a variety of policies that may
have diverse chances of success under non-democratic developmental states. Secondly,
the variety of autocracies results in degrees of bad and ‘not so bad’ governance, raising
the question of how certain types of authoritarian regimes succeed in upholding a certain
degree of good governance despite all limitations. The currently popular comparison of
Russia and China requires taking into account the various roles of political institutions
and personalism in these regimes. Despite the highly repressive nature of its regime,
China succeeds in certain forms of institutionalised cadre rotation and quality control on
the lower layers of its ‘power vertical’ (Libman & Rochlitz 2019). Thus, a cross-country
comparison ought to account for various institutional constellations in high-capacity
authoritarian states. More institutionalised authoritarian states are expected to perform
slightly better than personalist regimes, as they provide policy entrepreneurs with more
transparent rules of the game and more balanced processes of decision-making. Thirdly,
as Russia exemplifies a personalist dictatorship (Geddes et al. 2018), the personal
discretion plays a decisive role across policy domains and levels of government, so it is
necessary to study governing styles, biographies, and networks, as well as the propensity
to engage in risky behaviour. Personal clienteles and networks are expected to serve as
primary guarantees for political actors that engage in modernisation efforts. Finally, the
question of authoritarian modernisation remains the elephant in the room: can a
government achieve good governance without undergoing thorough democratisation? Can
a non-democratic government launch democratisation from certain policy domains such
as digitalisation, or from below, that is, local politics? Do bottom-up initiatives erode the
existing autocratic rule or, vice versa, enhance and prolong authoritarianism by shifting
activities from political struggle to ‘proxy’ representation and controlled participation?
These are the questions to be addressed by future research.

VLADIMIR GEL’ MAN , Professor, European University at St Petersburg, 6/1 Gagarinskaya

ulitsa, 191187, St Petersburg, Russian Federation; Aleksanteri Institute, University of
Helsinki, Unioninkatu 33, FI-00014, Helsinki, Finland. Email: vgelman@eu.spb.ru

MARGARITA ZAVADSKAYA , Researcher, Department of Political Science, European

University at St Petersburg, 6/1A Gagarinskaya Street, 191187 St Petersburg, Russian
Federation; Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri Institute,
Unioninkatu, 33 FI-00014, Helsinki, Finland; Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory for
Comparative Social Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Russian Federation. Emails: mzavadskaya@eu.spb.ru; Margarita.Zavadskaya@helsinki.fi

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