Providing goods and votes? Federal elections and the quality of local governance in Russia

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Is electoral support related to the quality of public goods provision? Does the dictum to deliver votes to the federal center harm local governance, or do better outcomes result in better opportunities to improve quality of governance? Our research contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: 1) we explore the variety of governance patterns on the understudied level of Russian municipalities, using the dataset of local statistical indicators for all municipalities starting from 2012 to 2018; 2) we estimate the effects of budget autonomy and electoral loyalty at the federal elections on public goods provision; 3) we explore whether elected heads provide local services. Our findings suggest that electoral loyalty does not uniformly improve public goods provision in municipalities, while elected heads also have limited capacity to provide better services.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEurope - Asia Studies
Volume73
Issue number6
Pages (from-to)1037-1059
Number of pages23
ISSN0966-8136
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jul 2021
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Fields of Science

  • 6160 Other humanities
  • Russian and Eurasian Studies
  • 5171 Political Science
  • public goods provision
  • local governance
  • United Russia
  • voting
  • mayors
  • political machines

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