Local Self-Government and State-Building in the Russian Empire

• In Event: Political Institutions and Governance in Russia: Historical Perspectives on Elite Control, Property Rights, and Democratic Values

Abstract

I examine the relationship between state building and local self-government in the nineteenth century Russian Empire by testing my theory of local democratization and elite compliance. I demonstrate how state-building strategies were constrained by the resistance of landowning elites, generating a low capacity equilibrium that was further exacerbated in the wake of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. I explore how the design of local self-government in the zemstvo reform of 1864 was used to incentivize local elites to share their private information with the state by creating a public register of land values and setting a land tax threshold for electoral participation. Then, I employ a quasi-experimental analysis, instrumenting private landholding with the location of monasterial estates, to predict the bargaining power of local elites. I find evidence in support of my hypothesis that local self-government was selectively targeted at the most powerful landowning estates, in order to incentivize information sharing and tax compliance within the zemstvo assemblies. I find that districts with zemstvo assemblies collected and shared more land taxes than those without, and validate the mechanism through a case study of elite behavior in Saratov province. My findings highlight a novel logic of local representation as state building, with implications for comparative historical democratization, decentralization and development, and the institutional foundations of the modern state.

Author

• Otto Kienitz, Johns Hopkins U