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The book offers a comparative analysis of center-region relations in Russia and in China. The authors focus in particular on fiscal ties and incentives, bureaucratic and local government practices, flows of information, and the determinants of divergence between both countries. The book is based on a synthesis of a large body of empirical and theoretical evidence, and will appeal to scholars in public economics, political economy and comparative politics, as well as to students and policy analysts.

Electoral authoritarian regimes often rely on patron-client relationships and political machines to win elections. While a growing literature has focused on the reasons why authoritarian regimes might want to hold elections, the economic consequences associated with the need to win elections have been less intensely studied. In this paper, we argue that while holding elections might offer authoritarian regimes a range of informational and other advantages in the short and medium run, the long-term economic costs can be significant and potentially destabilizing. This effect is especially strong in transition economies, where outdated and inefficient economic structures might be kept alive for political reasons. The theory is tested with an original dataset of gubernatorial appointments from a leading electoral authoritarian regime, the Russian Federation. We find that by incentivizing regional governors to use their political machines to win elections for the regime, the Kremlin effectively punishes those governors that are successfully developing their regional economies, with the effect being especially strong in regions where a high percentage of the population lives in Soviet-era single company towns.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: 16 / 20, University of St Andrews (School of International Relations), course: Human Rights un Theory and Practice, language: English, abstract: In his book “TheComing Anarchy”,the American journalist Robert D. Kaplan paints a dark picture of the situation in many developing countries in the early 1990’s, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. He describes societies marked by disease, overpopulation, poverty and criminal anarchy, where nation-states are increasingly losing importance and life is controlled by mafia-like structures and private armies.

Scholars of performance incentives for regional officials in transitional states debate the appropriate degree of centralization and decentralization of political control. Decentralized administrative systems are said to encourage beneficial jurisdictional competition among regional officials, inducing innovation and growth, and reducing the likelihood of predation by central officials. An alternative perspective holds that centralization enables central governments to set overall policy goals, selectively rewarding regional officials who meet them, and restraining local predation. In this paper, we argue that the key to an effective incentive system lies in the way centralization and decentralization are combined. To investigate this issue, we compare the performance, careers and incentives of regional officials in China and Russia during the last 15 years. Both countries combine centralized personnel selection with substantial administrative autonomy for regional officials, but differ substantially with respect to economic outcomes. We argue that the difference in outcomes can be attributed to a number of organizational features of the two systems that make performance-based evaluations more difficult in Russia than in China. In particular, we find that in contrast to China, provincial leaders in Russia are unlikely to be promoted for performance, have a lower turnover, are almost never transferred from one region to another, have less experience in executive positions, are more likely to come from the region they govern than their Chinese counterparts, and are not encouraged to show initiative in economic policy making.

What role can collective action by foreign investors play in an environment characterized by incomplete institutions? We study this question by looking on foreign business associations in the Russian Federation. By interviewing 17 foreign business associations and conducting an online survey of their member firms, we find that business associations play an important welfare-enhancing role in providing a series of support and informational services. However, they do not play a significant role in lobbying the collective interests of their member firms, especially in the current political context in Russia where since the start of the Ukraine crisis the business community seems to have suffered a general loss of influence on political decision making.

The most important resource to improve technologies in the field of artificial intelligence is data. Two types of policies are crucial in this respect: privacy and data-sharing regulations, and the use of surveillance technologies for policing. Both types of policies vary substantially across countries and political regimes. In this paper, we examine how authoritarian and democratic political institutions can influence the quality of research in artificial intelligence, and the availability of large-scale datasets to improve and train deep learning algorithms. We focus mainly on the Chinese case, and find that - ceteris paribus - authoritarian political institutions continue to have a negative effect on innovation. They can, however, have a positive effect on research in deep learning, via the availability of large-scale datasets that have been obtained through government surveillance. We propose a research agenda to study which of the two effects might dominate in a race for leadership in artificial intelligence between countries with different political institutions, such as the United States and China.

How do independent media affect regime support in an autocracy? We carry out two field experiments in Russia by promoting the country's only independent online TV channel to a randomized sample of cities and individuals before the 2016 parliamentary elections. In both experiments, we find that independent media foster polarization, increasing turnout and progovernment votes among regime supporters, and reducing it for nonsupporters. The effect, however, holds only for voters who rely on news from social media; among consumers of traditional media, our treatment uniformly decreases regime support. Our results highlight how social media can mediate the effect of independent media in autocracies.