Quality of regional political institutions: Attempt of measurement

Abstract

This article examines the problem of measuring the differences in institutional and democratic development between the regions of the country. In 2000, there were two most important projects for measuring democracy at the regional level in Russia: the rating of the Carnegie Moscow Center and the project of the Institute «Public Expertise» and the Mercator Group. In the future these methods could not be applied due to changes in the electoral system and other political and institutional characteristics. In 2000-2010, various social, economic and personal gubernatorial ratings became popular in Russia. In these conditions, in 2014, an attempt was made to return from assessing the personalities or socio-economic development of the territories to the assessment of regional political regimes as such. This was done through a modification of the previous methodology of the Carnegie Moscow Center in the new conditions. Initially, the work was carried out at the Higher School of Economics, then from 2015 it was actually continued within the wider project of the Civil Initiatives Committee. One of the characteristics considered within the framework of this project was an attempt to assess the quality of regional political institutions (officially named in the methodology of the project «Level of Institutional Development and Adaptive Management»), measured exclusively by formalized criteria. The article describes in detail these criteria, the evaluation system for them and presents the results of measurements for four dates - the beginning of 2011, 2015, 2016 and 2017. As indicators, the level of political competition in elections was chosen; Institutional independence of the deputies of the regional parliament; Protection of parliamentary opposition rights in the regional parliament; The influence of the population on the formation of local government through the evaluation of the administrative system of the administrative center of the region.