Replication data for: Fiscal transfers, voting behavior, and national integration in post-Soviet Russia

By the mid-nineties, many observers viewed the Russian polity as fragmented and anarchic, threatened from within by nationalist and separatist movements, and ruled by a fractious and ever-less-trusted elite. The prospects for democratic consolidation appeared poor. Yet, of four post-communist federal states, Russia was the only one to survive even three years after its first competitive elections. The state's relative cohesion is puzzling. This thesis argues that beneath the surface of Russia's apparently chaotic and confrontational politics, poorly understood mechanisms of integration existed. Indeed, it argues that some conflicts were part of one such mechanism. An interlinked process of protest, elections and fiscal redistribution was, in the short run, partly filling the institutional gap created by the absence of coherent national parties or effective hierarchical bureaucracies, and helping to integrate regions of the country. The study finds evidence that the allocation of net fiscal transfers among Russia's 89 regions disproportionately favored the most determined "troublemakers", which had demonstrated the capacity and resolve to threaten economic or political cohesion through past strikes, separatist measures, or high election votes against Yeltsin. Such regions were appeased with greater subventions, credits, and revenue retention shares. Regions which received greater net transfers, in turn, had high er levels of regional government spending. And such spending was effective at buying electoral support for both regional and central incumbent politicians. Finally, in those regions where local electoral approval of President Yeltsin remained higher, regional officials were more likely to support Yeltsin at moments of constitutional crisis. Thus, by redistributing fiscal resources--and indirectly levels of public spending--between regions, the central government could increase its electoral support and forestall protests by leaders in the most risk-seeking or strategically important regions. While Russia's future remains uncertain, the crisis-management pattern of fiscal redistribution suggests one reason why the "politics of protest" in post-Soviet Russia has not yet led to state collapse. At the same time, since votes are more expensive to buy in "troublemaker" regions than in the regions from which net transfers are extracted, it can also explain the erosion of Yeltsin's nationwide electoral majority. Full Text is Available through ProQuest, Document ID: 740909031