Neopatrimonializm in Russian Regions

Neopatrimonializm as a particular type of political relations, combining elements of traditional patrimonial domination with legal-rational practices, provides better opportunities to reflect the modern features of functioning of the Russian political institutions. Many Western and domestic political scientists in their researches indicated the predominance of neopatrimonial features in Russian politics such as personification of power, concentration of resources and control of their distribution by political center, the prevalence of patronage relations in the structure of political and economic processes and so on. This study was devoted to the problem of excessive bulk of the neopatrimonializm concept, that requires specifying on the example of modern Russian political conditions. Thus, the aim of this research was to identify the main areas that contribute to the institutionalization of the neopatrimonializm elements in the Russian regions. It is worth noting that the most interesting to study are regions of European Russia, or those subjects of the three federal districts, excluding the national republics (33 regions) – the Central, the Volga and the North-West Federal District. In accordance with the aim were solved the following tasks: theoretical and methodological bases of formation and functioning of neopatrimonializm were studied; analytic model of the neopatrimonial elements in Russian regions was developed; the evolution neopatrimonializm in Russian regions was studied; the main types neopatrimanializm were identified; the prevalence of these types in modern Russian regions was studied.In this work, based on the indicators of three selected areas - the prevalence of informal practices, the level of competition and the degree of dependence of the region from the Centre, were offered four types of neopatrimonializm. Classic neopatrimonializm combines three areas in its extreme manifestations - the prevalence of informal practices in the structure of regional political relations, the low level of electoral competition and the region's dependence of the Centre. Autonomous neopatrimonializm is characterized by a combination of informal practices and low political competition with the autonomous regions from the Centre. Negotiated neopatrimonializm is characterized by high level of competition that "adjacent" to the dependence of the region and the prevalence of informal practices. The last type is "formal", that combines dependency from Center, low level of competition and low prevalence of informal practices.According to this analysis, the proposed model was able to identify neopatrimonializm nearly in the half of the regions under study (13 out of 33 regions in the three federal districts). Neopatrimonializm is least common in the North-West Federal District (one region - Pskov region), and more often in the Central Federal District (9 regions). An important conclusion of the study was the fact that most of the studied regions of the European part of Russia belong to negotiated type. Moreover, in half of these regions financial dependence on the Centre lower (compared with an average share of transfers in Russia) than others. All regions of classic and "formal" neopatrimonializm also hit the number of financially dependent regions on the same indicator, which suggests the importance of the level of the electoral competition, which is responsible for the effect on "transition" to democracy regions.