The best among the connected (men): promotion in the Russian state apparatus

ABSTRACT

Bureaucratic promotion criteria create powerful incentives that shape the behavior of bureaucrats, governance, and regime legitimacy. Yet informal rules governing the functioning of the state apparatus are notoriously hard to uncover in authoritarian settings. Using a unique survey of Russian regional and municipal bureaucrats with an embedded conjoint experiment, I explore the criteria used for promotion decisions. I discover that personal connections to the future supervisor are a major favorable factor for bureaucratic promotions in Russia. For candidates with such ties, education and experience add extra advantage. Importantly, gender plays a crucial role; gender bias cannot be compensated by better education, experience, or a specific family strategy – and it is men with informal ties who drive the effect of personal connection on promotions. The study highlights the complex interaction between formal and informal criteria within Russian bureaucracy and contributes to our understanding of post-Soviet neopatrimonial politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• bureaucracy
• promotion
• neopatrimonialism

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Andrey Yakovlev, Alexander Kalgin, and Amina Guseinova from the National Research University–Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) for invaluable support and the organization of the survey, Bilyana Petrova and Silviya Nitsova for extensive feedback, and the participants of ASEEES 2021, MPSA 2022 (Midwest Eurasian Political Economy Workshop participants and Jordan Gans-Morse in particular), and APSA 2022 for their comments. The author is an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia), and this article was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2023.2253415

Notes

1. Provided by the regional Ministry of public administration.

2. The research project was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill prior to fielding the survey (IRB number: 21–1050).

3. More details about the survey, its context in 2021 Russia, and an analysis of respondents’ behavior are presented in online Appendix D.

4. An example question is provided in online Appendix A. Online Appendix F provides a set of diagnostic tests that check the main assumptions of the conjoint experiment using the collected data.

5. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, we were unable to include “political loyalty” or a proxy for it (such as party affiliation or support) as one of the treatments. Given the political climate in Russia in 2021, we had concerns that the inclusion of such an item would deter civil servants from responding to the question altogether. I, therefore, focus on the effects of personal (but not political) connections. More information about this issue is provided in online Appendix D.

6. It is important to note that this particular operationalization of personal ties captures only one aspect of personal relationships within government organizations. There are other informal relationships that can be studied separately – kinship and family ties, ethnic networks, etc.

7. Estimated using https://mblukac.shinyapps.io/conjoints-power-shiny/. A traditional rule of thumb is being able to detect the effects of appropriate sizes with power of at least 80%.

8. According to official data provided by the Russian State Statistical Service, in 2019 women constituted 72.3% of civil servants at the regional level and 77.1% of civil servants at the municipal level. It is important to remember that this is the average number irrespective of the position level – traditionally, women are the most numerous in lower positions and less prominent the higher in the formal hierarchy you look. See “The Number and Composition of Employees in Positions of State and Municipal Public Service” at https://rosstat.gov.ru/folder/11191.

9. Reference levels: female, single, educated in a neighboring region (Pskov), no prior experience, 5-year tenure, no personal ties, good relations with work colleagues, leadership qualities. Reference levels were selected for convenience of interpretation. Marginal means in online Appendix B report the results of the main analysis irrespective of the reference treatment level.

10. A table of full regression results and a marginal means plot are presented in online Appendix B. Robustness checks using subsamples of respondents based on their demographic characteristics and survey behavior are included in online Appendix E.

11. I use marginal means plots to report subgroup comparisons and interactions, as interpreting subgroup differences is more intuitive without a reference category. For plots of marginal means, there is a vertical line at the 0.5 value – the effect of a given attribute with its 95% confidence interval being to the right of that line indicates preference for this attribute level (and how strong this preference is), and to the left of the line – rejection or negative preference for a given attribute level.

12. Full model comparison with ANOVA to check for preference heterogeneity across two groups indicates that the difference between the models is not significant at α = 0.05level.

13. The analysis is somehow limited by the sample size, as looking at higher-level interactions with three or more features (or complete profiles) would require a significantly larger N. That is, there might be combinations of two or more attributes that can together outweigh gender or personal ties. Nonetheless, the results are informative.