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ABSTRACT
The social origin of elites is important as it, first, affects the political decision-making, and second, is an indicator of social mobility important for the stability of a political system. However, how does the consolidation of an authoritarian regime affect the composition of elites in terms of their social origin? This study investigates this question looking at a sample of Russian regional governors in the period of 1992–2016. We document a gradual decrease of the share of governors from peasants’ and workers’ families, which is most likely related to abandoning the Soviet elite recruitment practices. At the same time, the main beneficiaries of the change (outside the ethnic regions) are not the most privileged groups (children of high-ranked bureaucrats and politicians) but rather offspring of intelligentsia (doctors, teachers and engineers). Interestingly, the military social origin became more important prior to Putin’s presidency, during the era when Russian politics was more competitive and pluralist.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Vladimir Gel’man, Fabian Burkhardt, Julia Langbein, Alexander Schmotz and the participants of a research colloquium at the LMU Munich (2018) and the German Association of Political Science (DVPW) conference (2018), as well as the Editor and three Referees, for their helpful comments. The study has been funded within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ’5-100ʹ. All mistakes remain our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary material
Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here
Notes
1. Early socialization (in the first years of life), which is closely related to social origin, has been shown to play a crucial role in determining behavior, life’s choices and career attitudes (Dryler Citation1998; Achen Citation2002; Jennings and Niemi Citation2014; Gidengil, Wass, and Valaste Citation2016). Some claim that precisely this early socialization in the family determines the fundamental values and skills an individual has (Heckman Citation2011; Holbein Citation2017). Social origin could determine observable life choices (like education or career), but it also affects the characteristics of an individual, which are more difficult to observe: e.g. values, convictions or “soft skills”, which all matter for the political outcomes.
2. Recently, the regime started creating a set of formal advancement channels for individuals aspiring membership in the elites (kadrovyi rezerv). So far most of these mechanisms are purely formal and have little impact on the elite recruitment.
3. In an insightful paper, Burkhardt (Citation2018) studies the formation of political dynasties in the Russian federal elites, but he does not look at other types of social origins and does not cover regional elites.
4. Matsumoto and Okazaki (Citation2017), studying a highly idiosyncratic case of the Meiji Revolution in Japan, conclude the consolidation of the new regime was associated with both increasing share of children of high-ranked elites of the old regime in the new elite (which was smaller during the regime transition) and with more elite members from the families of the commoners.
5. Both politicians/bureaucrats and intelligentsia belong to the educated strata of society in the USSR. The career military is more heterogeneous; during World War 2, it was not unusual for soldiers to be promoted to officers or for officers to receive their rank without obtaining a college degree. Under Khrushchev, a college degree (voennoe vysshee uchebnoe zavedenie) became mandatory for officers.
6. Of course, even if the intelligentsia social origin is less attractive than the military or the bureaucratic one, we still may observe more offspring of intelligentsia in our data simply because intelligentsia was a more numerous social group. However, we look at the composition of a very small set of Russian governors. There are more than enough offspring of the bureaucratic families to fill their ranks.
7. Behrend (Citation2018), in a study of political dynasties in the Argentinian provinces, shows that their importance is positively correlated with a more democratic federal political regime.
8. Hughes (Citation1997) shows that in the 1990s the representation of intelligentsia in the elites decreased because of the loss of their status, but his focus is on the professional background of the elite members themselves and not on their social origin.
9. An example is the so-called May decrees of 2012: a series of presidential decrees setting specific development goals for the Russian regions, e.g. requiring them to increase salaries of public sector employees. Another example is occasional anti-corruption crusades of the federal government (Obydenkova and Libman Citation2015).
10. Growing up in an educated household is associated with stronger success in schooling (Evans et al. Citation2010; Evans, Kelley, and Sikora Citation2014). Certainly, parent’s education does not provide specific, technical knowledge. But it does provide “soft skills” improving the ability to acquire such knowledge, motivation to do so, ability to adjust to changing requirements of the (bureaucratic) workplace or to apply the technical knowledge obtained through formal education to solving professional problems. This should make second-generation university graduates more successful in public administration than the first-generation ones.
11. The issue of the “technocratic appointments” of the governors in Russia is frequently discussed in the literature (Di Stephano Citation2018).
12. In most cases, the information was given by the governors themselves, e.g. in media interviews or on their official websites. However, we have no reason to suspect that this information is untrue: As elections have been unimportant for most governors (with the exception of 1996–2004), it seems unlikely that their origin has been used – and thus might have been hidden or obscured – to attract voters; and, as mentioned, even in 1996–2004, there is no evidence that social origin somehow mattered in the electoral discourse.
13. Besides, later positions might be influenced by their children’s political career.
14. In the USSR the difference between “political” and “bureaucratic” career is not as clear as in many other societies. In an authoritarian system, the boundary between (elected) politicians and (appointed) bureaucrats does not exist. The group of top bureaucrats is extremely small and is mostly merged with other groups in our analysis.
15. The residual category includes, for instance, two governors, who come from the family of priests; one governor, whose father was a merchant vessel captain; and one entrepreneur (for a very young governor mostly brought up in the post-Soviet era). Among the mothers of the governors, we have a non-negligible share of housewives.
16. The set of ethnic regions includes all autonomous okrugs, autonomous oblast and republics. Crimea does not count as an ethnic region in spite of its republican status.
17. As mentioned, due to data availability, our focus is on the analysis of the fathers of the governors. For the mothers, only about 20–40% of the governors (depending on the particular year) provide any information about their occupation at all. We have no governors where mothers are reported to be of the military background and very few with bureaucratic background. What we do observe, however, is a surge in the share of governors’ mothers, who come from intelligentsia families: by 2016, it is the largest group of the governors in our data (see SM A).
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