Political Loyalty vs Economic Performance: Evidence from Machine Politics in Russiaas Regions

Extra votes to signal loyalty: regional political cycles and national elections in Russia

“…Reuter and Robertson (2012) find that under the system of appointing regional governors by the president, which existed in Russia from 2005 until 2012, electoral outcomes in national-level elections have a strong impact on appointment decisions, while regional economic development and the quality of governance play, at most, a limited role in appointments. This finding is confirmed by, for example, Reisinger and Moraski (2013), Gelman (2008), Gelman (2010), andRochlitz (2016).…”

Russia's 1999–2000 Election Cycle and the Politics-Banking Interface

“…Reuter and Robertson (2012) and Reisinger and Moraski (2013) show that what matters for a governor's prolonged tenure in post-2000 elections is the capacity to deliver sufficiently high election results for the president and the ruling party. Rochlitz (2016) recently confirms this view with evidence that the Kremlin has provided incentives to regional governors who use their political machines to favor the electoral performance of the ruling party during 2005-2012.…”

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

“…The novelty of our paper consists in testing for the politicization of a relatively low-level bureaucracy that is nominally depoliticized, and not visibly involved in voter mobilization during elections. 2 To limit the likelihood that the behavior of bureaucrats in our experiment is nevertheless motivated by the 2 While some regional bureaucracies in Russia, such as the office of the regional governor (Reuter and Robertson 2012;Reuter 2013;Rochlitz 2016) or mayors (Reuter et al 2016;Beazer and Reuter 2019) are often directly involved in running regional political machines, this is not the case for investment promotion agencies. When building our dataset we took care to check for any signs of political affiliation for the agencies included in our sample, but did not find any instance where this was the case.…”