Levels of Centralisation and Autonomy in Russia’s ‘Party of Power’: Cross-Regional Variations

Petr Panov and Cameron Ross

Europe-Asia Studies, 2016, vol. 68, issue 2, 232-252

Abstract: The institutionalisation and nationalisation of Russia’s party system, which is dominated by United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya—UR), has played a major role in the building of Putin’s ‘power vertical’. Nevertheless, despite the fact that formal relations within UR are highly centralised, informal practices allow for far greater degrees of regional autonomy. Focusing on UR’s candidate selection for the 2011 Duma election this article provides an examination of cross-regional variations in the relations between UR’s Party Centre and its regional branches. As electoral legislation requires the segmentation of party lists into ‘regional groups’, the composition of the regional lists, specifically the share of ‘native candidates’, is considered as an indicator of the level of autonomy of regional branches. Ordinal regression analysis confirms our main theoretical hypotheses. In the more financially autonomous regions, UR’s regional branches will have more leverage and bargaining power in their relations with the Party Centre. A second important factor is heterogeneity: the more a region’s socio-economic indices deviate from the national average (either up or down), the less its UR branch is subordinate to the Party Centre.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2015.1125854 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ceasxx:v:68:y:2016:i:2:p:232-252

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ceas20

DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2015.1125854

Access Statistics for this article

Europe-Asia Studies is currently edited by Terry Cox

More articles in Europe-Asia Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().