New article by Alexander Libman and Fabian Burkhardt: "The Tail Wagging the Dog? Top-down and Bottom-up Explanations for Bureaucratic Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes"

"The Tail Wagging the Dog? Top-down and Bottom-up Explanations for Bureaucratic Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes" is the title of an article that has been published in the lastest issue of the renowned journal "Russian Politics". Authors are Alexander Libman, professor for Social Sciences and Eastern European Studies at LMU Munich as well as principal investigator of the Graduate School, and Fabian Burkhardt, alumnus of the Graduate School. The paper investigates the link between the sub-national variation of political regimes in a (at the federal level) non-democratic country and the appointments of federal officials in the sub-national provinces.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Libmann holds the Chair of Social Sciences and Eastern European Studies of the LMU Munich. His main research areas are informal power relations and bureaucracy in post-Soviet authoritarian regimes, historical legacies and political developments of the post-Soviet Eurasia and sub-national political regimes and regional politics in Russia. Fabian Burkhardt's doctoral project "The Presidency and Power Sharing in the Russian Federation - A Study of Institutional Change" analysed the central institution of the Russian political system: the presidency.

"Russian Politics" is an international, peer-reviewed journal examining the scholarship of intersections between on the one hand, Russian studies, and on the other hand Politics, Law, Economics and Russian history.

Abstract of the article

The paper investigates the link between the sub-national variation of political regimes in a (at the federal level) non-democratic country and the appointments of federal officials in the sub-national provinces. In particular, it looks at the appointment of the chief federal inspectors to the regions in Putin’s Russia in 2000–2012. The main research question is whether appointment patterns can be explained by top-down concerns of the central government willing to keep control over the most unruly regions or by bottom-up self-selection of bureaucrats belonging to influential groups into more attractive positions more suitable for rent-seeking. The advantage of this case is that data they have at hand allows the researches to distinguish these two logics. The results indicate that for the Russian chief federal inspectors in 2000–2012 bottom-up self-selection appears to be the more plausible explanation of the link between sub-national political regimes and appointment patterns.

Fabian Burkhardt, Alexander Libman: The Tail Wagging the Dog? Top-down and Bottom-up Explanations for Bureaucratic Appointments in Authoritarian Regimes. In: Russian Politics 3 (2), 2018, pp. 239–259. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/2451-8921-00302005

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