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Why have the Russian media failed to support grass-roots political initiatives? In particular, the powerful medium of state television has sided continually with rulers rather than popular movements. This paper examines television content over several Russian election campaigns to track the development of the post-Soviet media as a tool of the state rather than a voice for the masses. The paper focuses on content analysis of campaign news, including the 2003 Duma elections, to analyze the lack of balance and objectivity in the Russian news process. At the same time, the study shows that there is still significant variation in content between nightly news on the prime state-run and commercial channels. How valuable are these differences? Are Russian viewers able to get enough information to make wise vote choices? Does commercial television, albeit now operating in the shadow of the Kremlin, provide a lifeline for media freedom in an increasingly oppressive system? Data from surveys and focus groups suggest that while viewers perceive the differences in coverage ? as well as the fact that they are not being given access to full information ? many have come to prefer orderly, authoritative media over the messier, more democratic approach to news. A cross-national review of media performance across a decade of elections in Russia and four other post-Soviet states shows that the pervasive problems of a lack of a professional media have presented a persistent obstacle to democratization [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What could be motivating voters in emerging democracies to vote for leaders who have proven themselves to be skilled at violating human rights, repressing civil rights and liberties, and ruling without democratic institutions? If voters elect former authoritarians because they prefer authoritarianism to democracy, and if the former authoritarians use their public mandate to subvert democracy once they take office, then the future of democratic consolidation could be in serious danger. As we note in this paper, there are numerous instances around the world in which voters are supporting former authoritarians. This paper looks at two such cases, Bolivia and Russia, by tapping into voters’ motivations for choosing former authoritarians in two presidential elections. We carry out a least-similar-systems design in which we search for common predictors of vote choice in countries that differ in their past and current political and economic situations. After testing the implications of a number of different theoretical approaches, our major finding is that, in both cases, support for authoritarian attitudes and values appears to be a very important predictor of the likelihood of voting for former authoritarian rulers, more so than social capital, trust in institutions, demographic characteristics of the respondent (particularly in Bolivia), and concern over specific issues (particularly in Russia). Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two newly democratized post-Soviet giants, Russia and Ukraine, share a host of post-communist parallels. The long dominance of the CPSU in both countries denied them a legacy of open, democratic politics. Based on these parallels, one would expect their patterns of legislative behavior to mirror each other. Commonalities exist in the legislative behavior of both chambers; however, in at least one area, they are not analogous: the level of parliamentary party discipline among SMD deputies.the Ukrainian SMD deputies of the first mixed-member Rada (1998-2002) voted with the majority position of their parliamentary party at higher rates than their Russian brethren did in the first mixed-member Duma (1994-1995). In this paper, I attempt to find an answer for this conundrum by analyzing the roll-call voting behavior of SMD deputies in both legislatures. I argue that the higher level of discipline among SMD deputies in the Rada is a function of a more pronounced social cleavage found in the Ukrainian electorate. While both Russia and Ukraine feature a pro-reform/anti-reform cleavage, only Ukraine features a reinforcing regional cleavage built on ethnic and linguistic differences between eastern and western Ukraine. The presence of this reinforcing cleavage helps solidify behavior in the Rada, while Russia, lacking such cleavages, features a more fluid legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that political parties can be an important mechanism by which to better integrate states in the developing world. Despite this, in Russia parties continue to only weakly penetrate provincial politics and thus do not help to integrate the state and enhance its abilities to govern in the periphery by extension. Drawing on evidence of weak central state capacity to govern in the Russian provinces and correspondingly weak political party penetration, the paper argues that emergent political and economic actors have little interest in building political parties and increasing state integration and capacity as a result. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the argument and analysis for the future of Russian political and economic development. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of post-communist democratization needs to be better connected theoretically and empirically to fundamental political questions such as the character and legitimacy of state-society relations. Focusing on Russia and China in the 1990s, this paper finds that the legitimacy of national state institutions has declined in both countries, although the decline appears to be less steep in China while the current level of legitimacy appears to be comparatively lower in Russia. The paper also draws upon different kinds of data to show that the decline in legitimacy is not a function of a growing "longing" for democracy that has been stifled under an authoritarian Chinese state and a "superpresidential" Russian state. In spite of a high level of support for ?democracy? in the abstract in Russia, in neither country does the preference for specific features for democracy appear to weigh in significantly in evaluations of the state, and illiberal and undemocratic attributes of the state are not only tolerated but welcomed if they promise to deliver political order, economic well-being, reduced crime and corruption, social justice, and a coherent national identity emphasizing historical distinctiveness and cultural particularism. As an alternative to arguments that conflate levels of democracy and legitimacy, we offer some tentative hypotheses that combine elements of currently popular and previously respected theoretical projects and that provide a partial explanation for both the decline in state legitimacy in post-communist Russia and China, and the comparatively higher level of legitimacy in the latter. We contend that the most relevant legacy inherited from the communist era in examining attitudes towards democracy and the state have to do with the stable, widely acknowledged dualism of formal and informal norms and practices that allowed ordinary citizens to incrementally improve their immediate situations outside of the officially sanctioned system of political control, economic exchange, and social organization. We also suggest that two features of the post-communist state -- the extent to which it is identified with familiar institutional practices and the extent to which it permits regularized channels of communication and exchange between state-connected elites and locally emergent networks -- affect the patience of the citizenry in evaluating the legitimacy of state institutions in the midst of transition. On both counts, China has fared better than Russia thanks to its incremental strategy and the separation of political and economic reform: the survival of recognizable state institutions has provided Chinese citizens with a sense of continuity and stability while limiting the attentuation of various tiers of connectivity linking local communities to state institutions and state-connected elites, while the more radical transformation in post-Soviet Russia has brought disorientation and detachment among Russians, while concentrating power and wealth in the hands of ?oligarchs? who are far fewer in number and far less connected to local actors than was the old Soviet nomenklatura elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the post-communist era in Russia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, in Toronto, Ontario, from September 3-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the regime of President Vladimir Putin, the Soviet regime's official ideological commitment to building socialism, and sovereign democracy.

Dominant parties are widely seen as stabilizing hybrid regimes, but there is less agreement on how these parties emerge and serve their stabilizing function. This paper draws on a logic of elite and mass collective action to argue that ideas and other sources of genuine popular support are likely to be crucial in underpinning the initial emergence and subsequent success of dominant parties in ways not usually recognized. In particular, such support can be crucial to the successful functioning of even the most coercive sources of party and regime power. Russia provides a rare opportunity in the world of comparative scholarship to study the initial emergence of a hybrid regime dominant party at the micro level, using mass opinion surveys. This paper demonstrates the important role of ideas and other forms of popular support (most notably economic assessments) using the Russian Election Studies series of surveys that span the emergence of Russia's increasingly dominant United Russia Party as well as the election cycle before that party first appeared (that is, 1995-2008). The most recent survey wave, conducted in spring 2008, includes embedded experiments and other items specially designed to identify more precisely the bases of United Russia's power. This includes the party's relationship to Putin, which turns out to be more complicated and less one-sided than previously thought. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has focused attention on the diversity and complexity of civil-social life in Russia and post-communist Europe, undermining normative and 'communist-legacy' explanations of the weakness of civil society in that region, and underlining the need for theory-building that is both generalizable and sensitive to the specifics of each individual case. This paper attempts to take another step in that direction, exploring how the ways in which elites in semi-authoritarian regimes compete for power - and the social meaning of the power they are competing for - shape the development of civil society. Examining elements of civil society, the paper presents evidence from extensive field research of key variations in the relationship between civic activism and power and argues that these variations can be traced back to crucial differences in the competitive incentives political elites in each context. Specifically, the prospects for civil society appear better when elites - even closed, corrupt and authoritarian elites - are forced to engage one way or another with society at large. The paper will argue that elite-led state-society engagement, regardless of its nature, is essential to building the framework on which citizens construct notions of justice and right, while disengagement and elite autonomy significantly impede the development of civic identities. Indeed, the evidence in comparative perspective suggests that civil society may do better when it is repressed than when it is simply ignored. This, then, points to the disengaged nature of the contemporary Russian regime, rather than its authoritarianism, as a major explanatory factor in the weakness of civil society in that country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research has shown that many of Russia?s democrats are skeptical about markets. While they may be democrats, they are not liberal democrats. The usual explanation for this tendency is that egalitarian and paternalistic orientations have produced a political culture in Russia that is hostile to economic individualism. This paper builds a different case. Relying on intensive interviews with ordinary Russians, I examine in depth the ideas of Russia?s market skeptical democrats. I conclude that the issue in Russia is not a problematical set of cultural preferences, but problematical markets. Capitalism as it exists in Russia does not have the qualities that help to reconcile tensions between capitalism and democracy. Market mechanisms and hence outcomes seem tilted to the benefit of the few and seem to reward impudence instead of industry. Unlike Russia?s liberal democrats, market skeptical democrats have these particular conditions in mind when they respond to questions about markets. Their suspicion of markets has more to do with how markets function in Russia than with preferences for greater egalitarianism or government control of the economy. Market-doubting democrats in Russia embrace the ideals of liberal economic freedom as readily as do most liberals. They are simply unconvinced that the markets developing in their country provide most people with those freedoms. Russia?s market-skeptical democrats, then, do not oppose the construction of liberal democratic institutions in Russia. They are simply withholding their approval of markets until markets start to function in a way that appears to serve the majority of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on democratic peace theory this paper argues that NATO can play an important role in encouraging good neighbourly relations between Russia and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the best explanations for the rapid collapse of communist regimes focus on disintegrative processes unintentionally set in motion by the Soviet system. The persuasiveness of these explanations rests on their ability to uncover the internal chaos behind the façade of communist power. With communist power now gone, that chaos has emerged into full view. But the systemic dysfunction of Soviet-style communism or of the ‘bandit capitalism’ that followed it has received little attention in studies of Russian public opinion. Many public opinion scholars seem to assume that, as long as the Soviet Union existed, Russians inhabited a system that lived up to its hype: a system that provided order, security, and a predictable if not free existence. Presumably, this system successfully inculcated a set of popular attitudes supporting a paternalistic, authoritarian state. Hence the implicit question of many studies of Russian public opinion is whether Russians really can be democrats, given their past. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding ordinary Russians’ apparently imperfect support for democracy lies not in the past but in the present conditions of their lives, conditions characterized by significant amounts of disorder and unpredictability. I show that the more Russians are troubled by the chaotic conditions of their daily lives, the less consistent they are in their support for democracy. I demonstrate this through analysis of intensive interviews I conducted with ordinary Russian citizens in 1998 and 2000 in cities and towns across Russia. Unlike mass surveys, intensive interviews permit respondents to articulate their concerns at length and in their own words. This provides a more detailed account of what respondents find troubling about democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since mixed electoral systems were adopted in the 1990s by a number of new democracies, a debate has evolved about the extent to which Duverger’s work can help us to understand their effects on the party system. At the core of this debate lies the question what mechanical and psychological effects we should expect to observe in mixed electoral systems. This paper addresses the debate through a case study of Russia’s mixed electoral system. Analysing Duma election results from 1993 to 1999 we find that Russia’s superposition system has effects which set it apart from pure PR and pure plurality systems, but which can be understood by examining the mechanical and psychological effects, which the electoral rules give rise to. This suggests that Duverger’s logic, not his predictions for pure electoral systems, should inform our study of mixed electoral laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the quality of democratic policy processes, and illustrates it through a study of pension reform policy-making in Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Kazakhstan in the 1990s and 2000s. The intention is to shed light on progress of democratization in these countries, and to provide a general analytical framework for future research in other countries and policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the institutional legacies of the one-party regime in Mexico and Russia respectively as they make the transition to democracy and market economies. Despite their differing histories, the countries are responding to similar globalization pressures, in roughly similar ways. However the Soviet legacy of strict limits on institutional pluralism and lack of a mechanism for ensuring leadership rotation left Russia ill-prepared for the democratic transition in comparison with Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as a stochastically set demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards. Religions are defined as collectivist, when their respective collectives facilitate the hierarchical provision of common pool resources toward their members at the expense of market incentives. Religions are defined as individualist, when their respective collectives recruit and preserve their members on the basis of market incentives. Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism are treated as collectivist religions, whereas Judaism and Protestantism as individualist ones. I provide a historical overview that designates the Jewish kibbutz as the collective of democracy and the Russian-Orthodox monastery as the collective of dictatorship. Assuming a collectivist economy, I solve the radical government and modernization stochastic games. I find that modernization occurs in a collectivist economy when the threat of a radical government is imminent and when the leader has high extraction rents over the economy. In order to stay in power, the leader credibly commits to provide more public goods in the future, and thus modernization occurs. Underdevelopment occurs at intermediate levels of state enforcement, modernization at low levels and centralization at high levels of state enforcement. The emergence of a radical government is more likely in a collectivist rather than in an individualist economy. My theory is backed with data from public goods experiments run with Russian bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox collectivist enforcement: 1. Solidarity, 2. Obedience, and 3. Universal discipline. I argue for the existence of an Eastern Orthodox hierarchy in the Russian bureaucracy that facilitates the delivery of public goods under conditions of universal discipline and the principal's overfulfillment. Eastern Orthodox hierarchy is enforced through universal disciplinary monitoring, which induces collective punishment when the public good is not delivered. Contrary to conventional wisdom about freeriding in administrative institutions, higher ranks in Russian bureaucracies are associated with less freeriding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the civil society and authoritarianism in Russia. It presents an overview of the political participation conceptualization and its causal role in the survival of democracy in the country. Moreover, it presents the factors that contribute to frail party system and the paucity of its civil society.

In the post-Cold War era, several hybrid regimes displaying a combination of democratic and authoritarian features have emerged from the debris of the Soviet Union. Regime support is crucial to understanding the survival of these political systems. Using an original survey, this paper investigates determinants of support for democracy among 13-16 year old adolescents growing up without any firsthand experience with communism in two hybrid regimes, Russia and Ukraine. This study explores the effects of social context, school, and political performance on pro-democracy attitudes of the young generation. The findings suggest that both civic education and subjective evaluation of incumbent authorities influence the level of support for democracy among students. Furthermore, the statistical analysis demonstrates that the east- west regional cleavage has a strong impact on regime support in Ukraine. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the view that the fate of Russian democracy and economic development is trapped by the "resource curse." It argues that there are several political and economic factors unique to Russia which make the relationship between resource dependency and the course of politica and economic outcomes more contingent. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, citizens of former communist countries have been the focus of a great deal of public opinion research. But concerns remain regarding how citizens in these areas interpret the questions they are asked, usually direct translations of questions from American or other Western surveys. Since present circumstances and recent life experiences of the participants are quite different from those of participants in Western surveys, we cannot be certain that they interpret words and the meanings of questions in the same ways. This potential for miscommunication seems particularly high in terms of how citizens relate to state power, since post-communist citizens likely approach government officials and institutions with considerable leftover communist baggage. This paper addresses how intensive interviewing can help survey researchers examine whether they and their respondents mean the same things. I show how intensive interviews can explore issues not easily addressed by standardized survey questions, as well as how intensive interviews can be used to improve the formulation of survey questions. I focus on questions relating to democracy and on efforts to capture popular support for government, including questions about trust.This work is based on sixty intensive interviews that I conducted with Russian citizens between 1998 and 2003. These were interviews in which the respondents were free to talk at length, and provide stories and examples to clarify their meaning. While mass surveys are unmatched in terms of their ability to accurately represent the views of large numbers of people or to open possibilities for analysis involving multiple variables, they fall silent when it comes to trying to interpret what respondents have in mind when they answer multiple-choice questions. Intensive interviews, on the other hand, enable researchers to tease out what people mean when they select particular responses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Tocqueville's approach in his Democracy in America (1835) to analyze the absence of democracy in Russia in 2005. We find that conditions and morals are vital to explaining the duration of autocracy in Russia, yet these factors are often overlooked in Western analysis of contemporary Russia - specifically, the condition of vulnerability to foreign attack, and the moral role of religion. Tocqueville's institutional analysis concurs with mainstream thinking about the importance of rule of law and associational activity, but diverges with respect to the virtues of a mixed system of government. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is concerned primarily with the process and politics of liberalization or restructuring in one post-communist state: the Russian Federation. While most East European welfare states have undergone progressive liberalization, Russia has followed a distinctive trajectory: (see Table 1) ·..ASA-an initial period of radical liberalization (1991-1993); ·..ASA-an extended period of political deadlock and backpedaling through the remainder of the decade (1994-1999); ·..ASA-a condensed period of liberalization ‘breakthrough’ (2000-2003) Drawing on comparative welfare state literature, the present study explains this pattern primarily as a consequence of domestic political constellations, particularly the shifting relationship between Russia’s superpresidency and legislative and state institutions. It argues that constituencies defensive of the old welfare state have played a highly-constrained but still significant role in the welfare politics of Russia’s delegative democracy. And it shows that the pattern of shifts and partial liberalization has produced a ‘hybrid’ welfare system with large elements of informality, that conforms to neither state nor market models of social provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are post-Socialist states moving from a system of administrative arbitrariness to a system of fairness and predictability associated with the rule of law? I focus on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws in China and Russia in order to answer this question. As my field research demonstrates, despite the fact that Russia democratized and China did not, Russia has not been more successful than China in instituting a system of the rule of law in the area of IPR enforcement. Several factors account for this convergence between China and Russia. First, both countries have designated administrative agencies rather than the courts as the primary enforcers, thus perpetuating a system that emphasizes administrative discretion over rule-bound behavior. Second, in both countries, ambiguously drafted laws and regulations allow numerous agencies with overlapping jurisdictional mandates to get involved in the enforcement of IPR laws. However, since no single agency is required to enforce those laws, in practice agencies develop a particularistic enforcement style, where they enforce when stimulated by monetary incentives. This has led to a system of institutionalized bureaucratic corruption in both China and Russia. Third, the inability of the state to adequately monitor and punish the unlawful behavior of the enforcement agencies and the underdeveloped state of administrative litigation act as factors perpetuating administrative arbitrariness and impeding the creation of a system of the rule of law. It is important to note that China has been more successful than Russia in controlling its bureaucracy due to the continued existence of the Communist Party and the reliance on its control mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideal of electoral equality is contrasted with the prudential reasoning found in twelve opinions of the constitutional courts of Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Slovakia regarding the use of formal thresholds to eliminate minor parties. In all twelve cases the courts deferred to the legislative majority's will, and in nine cases provided their own justification of this deviation from equality. My analysis finds that the courts were guided by a conventional but uninformed conception of stability, and that the premises of their opinions are vulnerable to empirical refutation. In this area, the courts could better contribute to the quality of post-totalitarian democracy by acting as more vigilant disruptors of partisan lock-ups of the electoral process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue on building of a new regime ideology in post-communist Russia (Federation) and China. It cites a growing awareness of authoritarian capitalism which poses a more profound and long-term future challenge to the existing liberal democratic order by providing a competing political and socioeconomic vision with potentially broad appeal. In history, capitalism shares a close if not intrinsic link with democracy.

The article proposes a general framework of the normative orientations of national governments towards democracy in semi-democratic regimes and the different international mechanisms that support domestic civil society actors who express dissent or try to promote democratic processes and civil liberties focusing on the case of Russia. It discusses the several types of international mechanisms that transnational actors can adopt to support the existence of an active civil society. It relates the characteristics of different political regimes.

The phenomenon of crony capitalism has been explored primarily with reference to its impact on economic growth. This study investigates the political implications of crony capitalism and, specifically, the interaction between political competition and crony capitalism. Based on a case study of political trajectories in two regions of the Russian Federation, I argue that under crony capitalism political competition can undermine the legitimacy of state authorities and such democratic institution as the electoral mechanism. Played out in public during the electoral campaigns unrestricted political competition uncovers the predatory nature of crony elites engaged in struggle for power and wealth. Paradoxically, the electoral process itself gets discredited in the process as an essential part of the overall institutional order. Non-competitive political systems avoid such negative tendencies, at least in the short run. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of democracy at the subnational level vary significantly in many federations, especially in developing democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Instances of subnational authoritarianism are not uncommon in such nations. The literature on democracy and democratization, however, has mainly focused on regimes at the national level. Using quantitative evidence from the 24 Argentine provinces, I test theories of democracy that have been proposed by the national-level literature, and argue, drawing on rentier and fiscal theories of the state, that a key factor explaining variance in subnational democracy is the extent to which the incumbent in each unit benefits from rents. A burgeoning recent literature has studied the regime effects of natural resource rents (such as those produced by oil), and has suggested that, in very poor countries, foreign aid functions as a form of rent that hinders democracy. I argue that, in middle-income federations such as Argentina, the main source of subnational rents is the redistribution of tax revenues collected by the federal government. Rules and practices that disproportionally allocate these fiscal resources to poorer or smaller units provide their incumbents with generous rents that allow them to restrict democratic competition. Thus, fiscally progressive redistribution often results in politically regressive outcomes. A recursive OLS regression model shows that, in Argentina, the larger the federal fiscal (and oil) rents a province receives, the lower its level of democratic competition, even after controlling for modernization and other alternative theoretical accounts of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the four factors that prompted Belasurian President Aleksandyr Lukashenka to sacrifice some but not all sovereignty to Russia. The four factors are weak democratic norms, relation-specific assets, weak democratic norms and strong Russian interest in hierarchical relations. It argues that nationalism only partially accounts for the Belarusian policy of ceding some sovereignty to Russia. It also elaborates on the role of relation-specific assets.

The author argues that the Russian polity is a case of electoral authoritarianism. He contends that it is still useful to debate the grounds for conceptualizing Russia's political system as a hybrid, authoritarian or, as many still argue, an adjectival democracy, a democratic polity of sorts, whether an electoral democracy, an illiberal democracy or a delegative democracy. It looks at transitological literature so as to analyze post-Soviet Russia.

The article examines the alteration in the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin's broader reform agenda. Russia's decision to move from a conventionally less proportional system to a more proportional one echoes the electoral system reforms launched during the era of political liberalization in Western Europe. The country initially lacked a party system capable of allowing party-list proportional representation (PR) to operate in an inclusive fashion rather than an exclusive one.

The article examines whether there is a positive relationship between federalism and successful transition to democracy. It outlines some implications from scholar William Riker's theory to analyze the connection between federalism and transition to democracy. It argues that there exists bi-modality in the democratic tendency under conditions of constitutional federalism. It addresses the inconsistency of the current Russian federal model with open democratic competition.

This article examines the hypotheses concerning the role of political parties, regional democracy and fiscal autonomy in appeasing separatist demands and mass mobilization within the Russian regions during the 1990s. Following World War II, there had been a rise in struggles between central governments and sub-national groups who are seeking self-determination. One approach to foster unity through diversity is fiscal decentralization associated with federalism.

The article presents a case study of the industrial city of Volzhskiy, Russia. It states that during the 1990s, the city has evolved into a pluralistic system with a high level of political participation. It is stated that Volzhskiy's diverse economy, oppositional political activism, and local politicians' openness to the public has resulted in the consolidation of democratic institutions and transparency. Volzhskiy is now a city with a highly democratic City Charter in Russia.