When governors go abroad: Incentives for paradiplomacy in recentralised Russia

ABSTRACT

Due to the successful centralization efforts of the beginning of the 2000s, Russian governors almost lost their domestic as well as international agency. However, there is still a considerable variation in their international activity levels that remains unexplained. Employing an original dataset on the international activity of Russian governors from 2005 to 2015, the article investigates what effect regional political regime, ethnicity and other factors have on the level of gubernatorial participation in paradiplomacy. The level of regional democracy, the absence of ties between governors and regional elites, and the ethnic distinctiveness of a region are all positively associated with the engagement in international activity. The article demonstrates that regional authorities turn to paradiplomacy when faced with pressures for resource attraction and ethnic identity construction, even under the conditions of a relatively centralized authoritarian state.

KEYWORDS:

• Paradiplomacy
• Russia
• regional politics
• subnational governance
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Dr. Andrey Starodubtsev (HSE, St. Petersburg) for his help and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The data are available on Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/JYZ7NF.

2 The database can be accessed at http://www.integrumworld.com/int_profi.html.

3 The data on transfers are calculations by Dr. Andrey Starodubtsev (HSE, St. Petersburg), based on the data reported by the Federal Treasury (https://roskazna.gov.ru/).

4 The Carnegie Moscow Center index remains the dominant way to operationalize Russian regional regimes. Alternatively, one can use official electoral statistics, but it proves to be more volatile as it depends on the extent a governor managed to consolidate their political machine as well as on the genuine support of the electorate. I treat regional regime as a structural characteristic that does not change that easily.

5 Moscow and St. Petersburg are city-regions with the highest level of economic development, while Moscow is also the federal capital. The autonomous okrugs are among the least-populated regions specializing in oil and gas extraction.

6 Moscow and St. Petersburg are city-regions with the highest level of economic development, while Moscow is also the federal capital. The autonomous okrugs are among the least-populated regions specializing in oil and gas extraction.

Appendix 5 provides the OLS estimates on the cross-sectional dataset with all the time-varying variables averaged over the period under consideration as a robustness check. The results remain stable.

Additional information

Funding

This article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).