The article examines the political and power-related dimensions of Russia’s contemporary institutional order in terms of modern theories of domination. In these theories, domination is understood as a normatively undesirable form of asymmetric power relations based on dependence and subordination. One side holds institutionally entrenched authority to impose its will on the other, acting arbitrarily and self-servingly. This undermines the basic interests of the affected party and erodes the sources of their agency. The author applies the methodology of institutional political science to interpret modern concepts of domination as the exercise of arbitrary power. From this perspective, two paradigmatic approaches to conceptualizing domination are analyzed: the (neo)Roman and the Athenian republican traditions. The first focuses on the political and legal manifestations and limitations of domination, along with the principles of vivre libre (living free). The second emphasizes the communicative and procedural aspects of vita active (active life), with particular attention to the formation of agency and collective action (praxis). The empirical part draws on data from nationwide sociological surveys in Russia, allowing the theoretical constructs to be tested. The study compares the collective imagined institutional orders held by two distinct groups of respondents, labelled in the research logic as “Citizens” (those confident in legal protection against arbitrary state power) and “Subjects” (those lacking such confidence). By assessing the statistical significance of the identified differences, the study confirms the hypothesis that the institutional order of contemporary Russia (re)produces relations of domination. The scale and intensity of these relations limit the prospects for innovative social development. The article identifies the main factors driving the proliferation of power in the form of domination: delegitimization of the social contract, fragmentation of the political order, societal disintegration, and social entropy. The conclusion points to the inadequacy of piecemeal changes and argues for a systemic transformation of the institutional design. A key objective of such transformation is to ensure that the overwhelming majority of the population has confidence in their guaranteed possession of the political and legal status of a citizen protected by law.

The article analyzes the influence of sociocultural factors on the formation of institutional order in modern Russia. It has been shown that the central problem in shaping the Russian institutional order is the congruence of the emerging institutions to the sociocultural environment into which they are embedded. The thesis is based on the need to complement the neo-institutional approach with sociocultural. It is stated that the introduction and development of new, modern institutions are being impeded by the predominance in the mass consciousness of traditional social-ontological attitudes, above all of the sobornost, the communal understanding of social life as an activity of a kind of social organism, in which individuals are inseparable from society and the people as a whole is the expression of objective social truth. It is noted that the formation of a universal, unfragmented institutional order is impeded by the inherent “schism” in Russian socioculture, the conflicting character of culture, and the coexistence within it of different subcultures and values. An obstacle to the formation of institutional order is also the dualism characteristic of Russian culture, which manifests itself in the influence of both Western and Eastern sociocultures, as well as in the combination of deep archaic with traits typical of the modern era. One of the subcultures is democratic; its bearers, according to our empirical research, are about a third of Russians. Analysis of the values and normative complexes of citizens, as well as their attitudes and orientations, confirms the hypothesis regarding the potential for institutional changes in Russian society and the probability of a civic, democratic vector of transformational processes. Such a transformation will be possible if new institutions, norms and practices for Russian socioculture and political culture are grasped and implemented taking into account the specific features and traditions of domestic culture, rather than being mechanically transferred from another sociocultural and institutional environment to Russian soil.

This article attempts to bridge institutional and civilizational political science in order to examine the outposts of inter-civilizational contact–areas where   different civilizational spaces intersect. It does so through a case study of regions where Russian and Mongolian civilizational domains overlap. Civilization approach in international studies is becoming of paramount importance because of civilizational positions are fixed in Russian and international political discourse and legal documents, as well as in the international system of dynamic and conflict transformation. The study of these phenomena requires new methodological tools that overcome the limitations of the classical civilization approach and geopolitics. The author shows that institutional political science allows to focus on hierarchical identities and practical political actors, including attempts to construct civilizational identity as political and civilization-based political institutions, while civilizational political science makes it possible to take into account the superimposition of civilizational spaces on each other, to highlight “outpost intercivilizational interactions”, which are not seen solely as geopolitical cleavages, leading to civilization clashes. The cases of Transbaikalia, Buryatia, Tuva, and Kalmykia, demonstrate the multiple character of the identities of the inhabitants of these regions of Russia, which simultaneously exist in the Russian and Mongolian civilizational spaces, with the common Russian “citizen” identity coexisting with regional self-awareness. The author highlights the directions of activity of political actors, characteristic of these regions and especially the civilizational processes occurring in them. Such attention is paid to the practice of maintaining ethnoconfessional peace, the specific hierarchical identity of the local population, the orientation of young people to the differences in values, the place of intercivilizational dialogue in the life of the regions, and the prospects of becoming a major growth point for Russian public diplomacy. The author concludes that the positive experience of the intercivilizational dialogue in the outpost can become the basis for the successful development of Russia’s internal and external policy in the conditions of the formation of a polycentric world order of state-civilizations.

Conventional wisdom on the redundancy of coalitions under presidentialism is refuted by political systems in Latin American countries. Earlier studies confirmed that coalition formation process was not directly influenced by political system design, but rather by the characteristics of political parties and institutions that ensure their interaction within the system. The article examines the phenomenon of party coalitions in Latin American presidential and semi-presidential systems on the sample of 11 multiparty consolidated systems (Argentina, Bolivia,   Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay). The study was aimed to assess the impact of structural factors on government coalition formation at the country and party levels. The necessary conditions analysis (NCA) and the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) identified necessary conditions and sufficient configuration of coalition building at the country level with typical and deviant cases located and qualitatively described. Logistic regression analysis modeled the probability of individual parties joining a coalition. The 215 party-level observations included political parties, which participated in the national elections of the last two electoral cycles (2017–2019 and 2021–2024) and crossed the threshold of 1% of seats. The study confirmed the hypotheses on the relationship between political party's coalition membership and its structural and positional characteristics, proved the   significance of ideological distance from the president, identified the critical seat threshold in the lower chamber and compared the counter-directional influence of the coalition and blackmail potentials of parties on the likelihood of joining the coalition.

At the end of 2024, the Russia’s Government approved the Spatial Development Strategy until 2030 that replaced the version of 2025. Despite the active use of the “space” concept in regulatory acts on strategic planning, the legislator does not provide a clear definition of it creating terminological uncertainty in governance practice. The authors proceed from the assumption that, for the purposes of public policy, space cannot be reduced solely to territory as a legally defined portion of the earth’s surface. The article aims to address the question of how the state defines space as an object of policy and whether the distinction between “space” and “territory” has practical political and legal significance. The authors formulate research hypothesis as follows: in Strategy-2030 the concept of “territory” is used primarily to fix   administrative-legal and geographical frameworks, whereas “space” denotes a dynamic configuration of connections, priorities, infrastructures, and coordination mechanisms The methodological framework combines the comparative legal method (an analysis of concepts of space in European law), institutional analysis, and frequency-based content analysis of strategic planning documents. The empirical part includes a frequency analysis of word forms in the text of Strategy-2030 and comparative coding of its key semantic blocks against the Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation for the period until 2025. The results show that the new Strategy shifts the emphasis from the model of promising centers of economic growth and macro-regions to the model of backbone settlements, infrastructural connectivity, a digital governance platform, and monitoring of spatial priorities. On this basis, space is proposed to be understood as a two-layer category: the first layer is territory as the legal basis of sovereignty, borders, and competence; the second layer is an institutionally organized environment of interaction among subjects, objects, infrastructures, flows, and representations. The authors conclude that spatial policy requires not only the legal formalization of its instruments, but also methodological support that makes it possible to distinguish between different types of spaces and to consistently relate them to the goals, competences, and performance outcomes of public authorities in the field of spatial development at different levels. The findings may be used in the further improvement of the regulatory framework of strategic planning and in the preparation of practical recommendations for public authorities.

This article examines the value cleavages and the role of civic participation in contemporary Russia in the context of politicization and depoliticization processes. The author studies the Russian socio-political space as organized in terms of a “zone of power”, which limits citizen participation in politics and the formation of an institutionalized political field. The methodological framework of the study is based on a neo-institutional approach and a conceptual distinction between political power and power as domination. Using data from nationwide surveys, this article analyzes political preferences, value cleavages, and their relationship to civic participation. It shows that respondents' self-identification through ideological categories (“democrats”, “patriots”, “socialists”, etc.) is unstable and situational. It is, the author claims, a more promising approach to identify political preferences through expressions of agreement or disagreement with statements related to socio-political issues. The study found a statistically significant correlation between citizen engagement in civic activities and the presence of opinions on political issues. It was shown that measuring attitudes toward significant political figures, past and present, can be applicable / useful to identify political cleavages. Citizens evaluating the participation of others in protests positively are considered as a potential source of politicization. This group is characterized by more pronounced demand for expanded democratic mechanisms in governing the country, changes to the political and legal system, and public oversight.

The most recent wave of municipal reform in Russia was conceived as a further step toward the centralization and standardization of the country’s institutional design. Contrary to these intentions, however, the reform resulted in the persistence of significant institutional variation at the subnational level. This article examines the determinants shaping regional elites’ choices between alternative models of municipal governance-specifically, single-tier and two-tier systems-and advances a theoretical explanation for this observed diversity. The study employs a comparative case analysis of two Russian regions, Yaroslavl Oblast and the Republic of Dagestan, which exemplify divergent approaches to municipal organization. The research uses thirty semi-structured expert interviews as an empirical foundation. The analysis identifies three principal factors influencing the selection of municipal institutional models: social-settlement structures, ethnocultural configurations, and economic conditions. Beyond categorizing these factors, the article elucidates the causal mechanisms through which they shape reform outcomes, as reflected in regional choices of local governance arrangements. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the internal logic of institutional reform in Russia and offer broader insights into the determinants of asymmetric institutional design in contemporary states.

Over the past two decades, Russian urban renewal policy has evolved from fragmented and weakly demanded initiatives – such as Integrated Territorial Development (Kompleksnoe Osvoenie Territorii, KOT) and Development of Built-Up Areas (Razvitie Zastroennykh Territorii, RZT) – toward the formation of a large-scale nationwide mechanism of Integrated Territorial Development (Kompleksnoe Razvitie Territorii, KRT). This article aims to explain the logic behind the transformation of the   early programs and to identify the factors that shaped the specificity and relative success of the KRT mechanism. The theoretical framework of the study draws on historical institutionalism, the idea of the redistributive nature of institutions, and the concept of institutional layering, complemented by an analysis of actors' structural opportunities. The empirical basis of the work includes an analysis of legal and regulatory acts, secondary data, and a series of semi-structured interviews with experts and representatives of development companies. The research shows that the KRT mechanism emerged not as a result of rational design, but through a long-term evolution, institutional layering, the impact of external shocks (including the experience of the Moscow renovation program), and political struggle. It is established that the specificity of the mechanism is shaped by a profound asymmetry in the political and resource capabilities of actors. On the one hand, large developers managed to lobby for universal and favorable rules of the game at the federal level. On the other hand, the federal center ensured the implementation of its objectives through specialized development institutions (such as DOM.RF), bypassing ineffective local authorities. At the same time, citizens' influence is largely limited to reactive resistance. The conclusion emphasizes that, despite its scale, the KRT has not become a definitively stable mechanism, the multiplicity of legal interpretations and contradictory judicial practice continue to generate uncertainty, limiting the initial effectiveness of this institution.

The article examines the institutional features of committees functioning in the legislative bodies of post-Soviet countries at the present stage. Based on the thesis that parliamentary committees are unique organizations where politics intersects with expertise, the author compares their role in lawmaking between countries with different political trajectories but a common institutional past. The current rules of the regulations and laws governing the activities of parliamentary committees in 13 countries are used as an empirical basis. The features of the committees were analysed with three blocks of indicators: organizational properties and mechanisms of interaction with other structures of the chamber; features of the work at the reading stage; powers in the field of relations with the executive branch and external actors. The comparison showed that the basic functionality in the form of examination of draft laws and reports at the plenary session is identical, and the key differences are seen in issues of accountability to the governing bodies of the Chamber, participation in collegial management structures and the timing of initiatives’ consideration. It is noteworthy that these differences are not determined by the number of committees. The current configurations of features of the post–Soviet committees show that they function not as independent political actors, but as platforms for coordinating the interests of other actors, and in some cases as an object of struggle for control over formal levers of influence in lawmaking. The result of such a struggle may be expressed in the distribution of new committee-specific powers in parliament, for example, in the establishment of a system for involving non-parliamentary actors in the examination. The revealed status of the structure differs significantly from ones of the European experience, where committees have a wide range of powers between countries and often act as independent players in the legislative process. The results obtained complement the existing discussion about the institutional features of post-Soviet political systems. It can be concluded that the ideas about the work of parliamentary bodies, laid down at the stage of institutional transplantation thirty-five years ago, can still be preserved in the regulatory rules of the game and determine the properties of the decision-making process.

The article substantiates the theoretical and methodological status of locality as an autonomous level of analysis in political processes. The relevance of this task stems from the need to overcome static hierarchies in the social sciences, where the local has traditionally been viewed as a subordinate element of state or global systems. The model proposed in the article draws on the theoretical advances of two research traditions — political geography and constructivist approaches to institutions. The combination of these traditions enables a research approach in which locality is conceived as an active meso-level of analysis, where local institutional orders are produced through everyday institutional work. Such conceptualization helps move beyond the micro-macro dichotomy in institutional analysis while adding a spatial dimension to it, in which the local ceases to be the periphery of politics and instead becomes the most dynamic field of institutional change. Within this optic, the local level is seen as a heterarchical environment where formal structures and informal practices coexist in a horizontal mode of organization. The approach can be applied to the study of administrative reforms (such as border reforms or the redistribution of competences) and the localization of state policies. In the proposed view, these processes appear not as mere technical optimization or passive adaptation, but as political struggles over the distribution of resources and, crucially, over the construction of meanings.