Career Management Strategies for Regional Executives in Russia and China

• In Event: Blame and Accountability in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Political and economic performance in authoritarian polities depends critically upon the ability of regional executives to fulfill central policy objectives. Russia and China offer contrasting cases of the management of regional officials. In recent decades, the CCP pressed regional executives to maximize economic growth. In contrast, Russia emphasized the importance of regional officials’ political loyalty to the Putin regime as the dominant factor influencing an official’s career opportunities. 2012 marked a significant shift in the leadership of both countries. Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency while Xi Jinping took over as General Secretary and quickly consolidated power. Both leaders tightened central control over regional policy. We hypothesize, therefore, that we should observe a convergence in both countries’ systems of official career management to one more closely resembling the former Soviet nomenklatura system. The nomenklatura system combined strongly political criteria for career management with regularized procedures for the selection, training, evaluation, rotation, and promotion or demotion of regional officials. Economic performance was only one of many grounds on which officials were assessed; political patronage considerations were balanced against managerial competence.
To test this hypothesis, we analyze the careers of all regional officials (governors of Russian federal subjects; chief executives and party secretaries of Chinese province-level units) who have held office since 2012. We compare the career histories of those who were appointed in and after 2012 with those who were appointed prior to 2012 with respect to: aggregate career patterns, rates and periodicity of turnover, and correspondence of individual-level career moves to political, economic and social performance. Preliminary analysis suggests partial support of the nomenklatura hypothesis.

Authors

• Andrei Yakovlev, Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics

• Thomas F. Remington, Emory University