Words or deeds - what matters? Experience of recentralization in Russian security agencies

Alexander Libman

No 148, Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management

Abstract: The paper discusses the relative importance of the 'real' political actions versus the changes of symbolic nature in the bargaining over devolution, studying the case of personnel decentralization in security agencies in Russia in 2000-2007. While in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin regional branches of federal ministries in Russia were mostly captured by regional governors, allowing them to pass acts directly contradicting federal law, in 2000s the administration of Vladimir Putin gradually replaced the heads of regional branches by new bureaucrats, supposedly without any connections to the region. The results differ for different security agencies; however, the paper finds, surprisingly, that in several cases the appointment decisions were robustly influenced rather by symbolic gestures made by regional governments in the earlier bargaining process than by the actual devolution policies of the regions.

Keywords: Devolution; bargaining; transition economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 H77 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-geo and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/39662/1/633719315.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fsfmwp:148

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).