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Words or deeds: what matters? On the role of symbolic action in political decentralization

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Abstract

Although decentralization is often modeled as an outcome of bargaining over rents and policies, public statements, symbols and status have a great impact on this process as well. The paper studies the relative importance of “real” political actions versus changes of a symbolic nature in the bargaining over devolution, using the unique laboratory of personnel recentralization in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2000 through 2007. While in the 1990s, most regional branches of federal ministries were under control of regional governors, and Vladimir Putin replaced the heads of agencies with new bureaucrats in the 2000s, thereby cutting their connections to the regions. This paper finds a robust influence of symbolic gestures made by regional governments in the earlier bargaining process on appointments, even controlling for the actual policies. It finds that regions sending stronger signal in favor of devolution in the 1990s were less likely to be punished by the federal government.

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Notes

  1. My results are therefore related to the findings of Sharafutdinova (2010), who also described the advancement of centralization in Russia under Putin as an informal contract between the center and the regions.

  2. The ethnic bargaining factors (concentration of minorities and external leverage) have impact on both claim-making and secessionist actions; institutional autonomy an ethnic region has, however, affects only claim-making; but the ethnic fears and ethnic discrimination influence only actions, but not claim-making.

  3. The outcome can be more complex, if center or regions are more efficient in producing rents; then, for example, the center could agree to accept a higher level of autonomy to increase the “size of the pie” subject to redistribution, even if the “share of the pie” remains constant or diminishes.

  4. Theoretical models also crucially depend on the choice of the bargaining protocol. Empirically, identifying this protocol may be an extremely difficult task—protocols of negotiations may be flexible and change over time or may be determined only as part of negotiations.

  5. On costs and benefits of autonomy as determinants of decentralization see, e.g., Congleton et al. (2003).

  6. For critical discussion, see Garon (2012).

  7. The signal of contemporary outside options most often investigated in the literature is voting behavior, when the regional population strategically delegates decisions to politicians with extreme pro-secessionist preferences to increase their leverage over the center (Eerola et al. 2004; Gradstein 2004; Olofsgard 2004; Lorz and Willmann 2012).

  8. As a caveat, “deeds” may be associated with an attempt to at the same time benefit from federal public goods (by staying de jure in the federation) and reduce the region’s contribution to federal public goods. Thus, the active use of “deeds” does not necessarily imply a credible threat of secession (when access to the federal public goods is severed).

  9. It is even possible that “real actions” can be easier to revoke than public declarations, if the former are associated with more technical and complex issues that are difficult for the public to observe (what is, once again, not unusual in the relations between central and regional governments).

  10. In addition, “words” are crucial if one is looking for foreign support for possible secession or devolution (because they can reach external actors who are key to international recognition).

  11. The use of a media campaign by the federal center in the struggles over the appointments and resignations of the governors of Moscow and Bashkortostan in Russia in 2010 serves as a good example.

  12. In most areas of regulation, the regional administration was restricted by detailed federal standards; taxation remained mostly a federal affair.

  13. Furthermore, although crucial agencies (like the police) remained a de jure part of the federal administration, the regional governments received the official co-decision right with respect to appointments of some of the federal officials in the region.

  14. Treisman (2011) suggests that the impact of economic growth on Putin’s popularity was more consistent and robust. Yet he does not dispute that Putin’s effort to prevent separatism mattered—and thus, Putin is likely to have reacted on it.

  15. As late as 2005, a public opinion survey implemented by Fond Obshestvennoe Mnenie, one of the largest research centers in this area, indicated that 52 % of the Russian population considered the threat of the collapse of Russia as possible; 30 % believed it to be highly probable. See http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/reg_suv/dd051623, accessed March 11, 2014.

  16. The legislation was changed to facilitate this transition. For example, for the MIA, the regional governors lost the co-decision rights regarding the appointment of federal bureaucrats as of 2001.

  17. All Appendices are available in the Online Supplementary Material to the paper.

  18. In a robustness check, I control for the number of media events in the dataset as well as exclude outliers with very large number of events (exceeding 20). Results remain robust.

  19. For similar indicators, see Malesky (2008) and Stoner-Weiss (2006).

  20. First, to determine which acts are actually unimportant is difficult: Even minor decisions on organization of bureaucracy can de facto have a huge impact on how governance decisions are made. Second, acts may become important in conjunction with other acts—and thus even if individually each of the acts violating federal law is unimportant, together they might have a major impact on economic actors.

  21. While, for example, declarations of sovereignty contained some immediate implications for the regional governance (e.g., they set up the priority of the regional law), in fact they had no direct implications for the functioning of bureaucracy. For Russian bureaucrats, it is typical to ignore even the explicit provisions of the acts passed by parliaments and rather follow the specific internal instructions of their agencies, which sometimes take years to recognize the legal changes. So, proclaiming a status in a declaration usually changed not so much in terms of how bureaucracy worked (also in terms of fiscal flows or control over natural resources): For this purpose, a set of secondary and much less visible “real” policy measures was necessary. Some of the regions indeed implemented them, but the correlation between real policies and symbolic action has been imperfect. It is even more pronounced for other types of symbolic actions, like non-binding public statements.

  22. Because the typical mobility in the Russian bureaucratic hierarchy has been unidirectional from the regional administration to Moscow, and not between regions or from Moscow to the regions, it has been (before Putin’s reforms) relatively unlikely for a person not born in a region to work there for a long time.

  23. The t test suggests a significant difference in means for the regional bias before and after Putin; the hypotheses that the mean of the regional bias under Putin is equal to or greater than the mean under Yeltsin are rejected at a 0.1 % level.

  24. I also attempted to run regressions, using as the dependent variable a dummy whether the region was rewarded (i.e., regional bias increased) or not. But in this case, logit did not yield any results due to perfect prediction problem.

  25. Republics are Russian ethnic regions, which have been granted a special status and typically enjoyed higher level of autonomy and more consolidated elites in the 1990s; not all ethnic republics have low share of ethnic Russians though. Due to the multicollinearity problem between share of ethnic Russians and dummy republic, I also run a specification check with only one of these controls and confirm my results.

  26. In democracies, the role of electoral concerns in decentralization has been discussed by Amat et al. (2009) and Jametti and Joanis (2011). In non-democracies, the regional governors play a crucial role in manipulating the elections in their regions, and this may be a major issue in federal bargaining (Kalinin and Mebane 2011).

  27. I do not run regressions controlling for both electoral outcomes and membership in political coalitions, because these variables essentially capture the same thing.

  28. The interpretation of the finding as a causal claim requires caution—as mentioned, even although I use a broad array of controls, I cannot be sure I entirely rule out omitted variable bias though.

  29. If I drop all regions with the index of “words” smaller or equal to 2 (as discussed above), results are confirmed. I also drop Bashkortostan and Tatarstan—their leaders have occasionally exercised some public criticism of the Putin’s centralism (and, particularly, appointment of governors). Results hold as well.

  30. I used an alternative approach to estimate the interaction terms effect: constructed two dummies, with one being equal to 1 for regions, where value of “words” is above the mean, and another one being equal to 1 if the value of “deeds” is above the mean, and computed the interaction term of these two variables. I did not find any significant interaction effect. Furthermore, I also constructed two variables, equal to the value of “words” if deeds are above (below) average and zero otherwise, and regressed the dependent variable on these variables. Both are significant, however. See Appendix A6.

  31. My results for “deeds” may be affected by institutional reforms in Russia as well. Although in 2000, the head of the regional MIA branch was directly subordinate to the federal minister, an additional layer was established until 2007 in the form of agencies of the MIA on the level of the new federal districts (groups of regions monitored by an appointed presidential representative). Hence, it is possible that the observations in the data stem from the fact that the regional officials became less important, and the federal government may have been more open to focusing on the rhetorical adjustments made by the regional governors when appointing the regional heads of the police. At the same time, the federal government could maintain control through its appointees in the federal districts (who usually have no connections to the regions at all).

  32. All robustness checks apply the preferred specification, except those dealing with multicollinearity of controls (we estimate a set of various specifications in this case) and requiring the use of small samples (then only a few key controls are included).

  33. She also provides econometric evidence that attachment to certain territory and concentration of settlement of minorities is positively correlated with ethnic violence.

  34. Chechnya is, as mentioned, not in my sample.

  35. I had to use a small set of control variables than in the baseline regression, because the sample is very small: I control for the territory, population, dummy republic, dummy Northern Caucasus, power of the governor and initial level of regional bias. If I add all covariates measuring activities of the MIA and bargaining power of the governor to the set of controls (except income per capita, which precludes regressions from converging), results remain robust for the subsample of regions where the same governor stayed in power since 1993 only.

  36. This argument is in line with the general experimental literature on cheap talk. Although cheap talk does not provide credible commitments, in a complex environment, it offers “focal points” that all actors will use simply to reduce complexity (see discussion in Duffy and Feltovich 2002; Crosson et al. 2003; Tingley and Walter 2008; Balliet 2010; Ellingsen and Ostling 2010). Of course, one could argue that in the late 1990s regional governors could have sent alternative signals in form of “words,” adjusting the priors of the public and of elites in other regions. However, when I screened the Russian newspapers for 1998–1999, as described below, I found only one (!) governor who made a statement calling for decrease in regional autonomy (governor of Pskov, a region with a low value of “words” indicator anyway). Other governors either made nor statements or called for greater autonomy.

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Acknowledgments

The author appreciates very helpful suggestions of an anonymous referee, Toke Aidt, Guido Friebel, Vladimir Gel’man, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Henrik Jordahl, Vladimir Kozlov, Anastassia Obydenkova and Anton Oleinik as well as of participants of seminars at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, European University in St. Petersburg, Russian Academy of Sciences and conferences of the European Public Choice Society and the Southern Economic Association. The paper was supported by the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Universities of China, Project No. 11JJDGJW001. All mistakes remain my own.

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Libman, A. Words or deeds: what matters? On the role of symbolic action in political decentralization. Empir Econ 49, 801–838 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-014-0893-8

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