Bureaucratic reform and Russian transition: the puzzles of policy-making process

Svetlana Inkina

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0238-5

Abstract

During the two decades of post-Soviet transition, Russia has created a complex system of civil service and public administration. This system was first reformed in the early 1990s and then again in the early 2000s. The analysis presented here fills a gap in the existing literature concerning the dynamic of change associated with Russian civil service reform (CSR). It is argued that the process of bureaucratic modernization in Russia is undermined by the ambivalent nature of policy leadership with its financial, administrative, and technical support, and the ongoing bargain among policy advocates and policy implementers. In order to account for the outcomes reached by policy-makers, the paper presents a detailed analysis of expert interviews collected by the author among research community specialists, federal legislators, and other participants in the reform. The discussion highlights the importance of power dynamics, which resolves conflicting views of CSR among policy formulators and policy implementers. The findings, which consist of identifying necessary and sufficient conditions of the change process, have implications for studies of modern Russian politics, states in regime transition, and world-wide modernization.

Highlights

Bureaucratic modernization is a difficult concept to grasp
The current stage of Russian civil service reform suggests that the set of actors involved in CSR consisted of (1) policy experts who were engaged in a process of problem identification and agenda-setting; (2) ministers and other career politicians who were engaged in the development of policy options and proposals; (3) Presidential administration (PA)—the key decision-maker concerned with the issue of hierarchical subordination, and (4) the group of policy implementers, whose motivation structure, as mentioned earlier, included material and nonmaterial incentives, such as the level of pay or the system of interconnected protections and other possible conditions of their permanent work environment
Civil service reform in Russia, regardless of how little attention it has received, is a deeply conflicted political project that has stumbled over the lack of agreement concerning the future developmental trajectory of the Russian state

Summary

Introduction

Bureaucratic modernization is a difficult concept to grasp. The reason for this is that bureaucracy, on its own, is a sign of modernization, which in turn is a result of the gradual differentiation and specialization of functions that make democracy possible (Przeworski and Limongi, 1997, p. 154). The current stage of Russian civil service reform (which began in 1999) suggests that the set of actors involved in CSR consisted of (1) policy experts (practitioners and academics) who were engaged in a process of problem identification and agenda-setting; (2) ministers and other career politicians who were engaged in the development of policy options and proposals; (3) Presidential administration (PA)—the key decision-maker concerned with the issue of hierarchical subordination, and (4) the group of policy implementers (career bureaucrats), whose motivation structure, as mentioned earlier, included material and nonmaterial incentives, such as the level of pay or the system of interconnected protections and other possible conditions of their permanent work environment (for more information, see Obolonsky, 2006). All of these policy goals were highly ambitious requiring comprehensive rather than incremental approach, that was not yet properly matched with the operational and organizational capacities of the post-Soviet state, such as the size of the state and the decentralized nature of the post-Soviet civil service system, or the presence of parallel reform objectives, such as the goal of administrative centralization pursued by the federal government since the year 2000

The unresolved problem of CSR management process

Findings

Conclusion