Abstract
To understand the nature of political processes in a huge country that still retains some federal elements, it is important to bear in mind that the regional and municipal levels are of no less importance than the federal one. A top-down view of the political system at the federal level needs to be combined with a view from below. Not only does a federal perspective alone give us an oversimplified picture of what is taking place nationally but it also gives us a mistaken picture.
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Notes
The list of different innovations in the regions in the 1990s published in the Political Almanac of Russia was many pages long: Michael McFaul and Nikolay Petrov (1998) (eds), Politicheskii almanakh Rossii 1997 g. [Political Almanac of Russia ion 1997] (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center), Vol. 1, pp. 124–35). The top three leaders with the largest number of political innovations used to be Sverdlovsk region, Tatarstan and Primorskii territory. With the second raw innovative regions there used to be four compact cores: Ural, Tatar-Bashkiriya, Chechen-Ingushetiya, plus the two capitals and Primorye.
Subjectivity is inevitable here, but one way to reduce the effect is to ask a number of outside experts to contribute their evaluation. We did this in 1997 and 1999 in order to assess the extent of democracy in 57 oblasts and two federal cities (Moscow and St Petersburg). See Michael McFaul and Nikolay Petrov (eds), Politicheskii Al’manakh Rossii 1989–1997 [Political Almanac of Russia, 1989–97], Moscow: Moscow Carnegie Center, 1998, Vol. 1, pp. 139–46. What complicates this approach is that experts do not have an equally well-informed understanding of all the relevant regions, particularly in the context of the stormy political life of post-Soviet Russia. A number of qualified experts recently visited a few of the regions and are informed of the situation in a number of other regions, but their opinions about most of the regions are based on indirect, secondary sources. This second approach can help avoid systemic mistakes conditioned by uneven knowledge about developments in regions and public stereotypes. The alternative approach lies in detailing the scores for levels of democracy and breaking them down into individual components. Such an approach is labour-intensive and requires examination of voluminous raw data from each of the regions. At the same time it is justified for two reasons. First, it ensures relative uniformity of the evaluation method in each region, and second because the grade is assessed not once but each year, highlighting the dynamics of the transition. Both diminish the significance of the inevitable imperfections of the methodology.
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© 2012 Nikolai Petrov
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Petrov, N. (2012). Modernization and the Russian Regions. In: Jonson, L., White, S. (eds) Waiting for Reform under Putin and Medvedev. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011206_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011206_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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