Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

270 Vertical or triangle?would be necessary for its success. Instead it proved necessary to increase thesubject’s budgets to meet expanded social expenditure (the transfer did notlead to the anticipated reductions).This led to a vicious circle whereby local government’s role in large multilevelfunctions such as education, health and social support were reduced infavour of the subjects, on the basis that local authorities did not have sufficientbudget. 21 There were debates within the working group and the Kozakand (later) Shuvalov Commission over the risks in allowing the long-termpolicy of division of power between levels of government to become intertwinedwith a deeply unpopular rationalization of social guarantees, but consideredthat there was no option – this was the largest issue arising from theoverlapping jurisdictions of Article 72, and therefore had to be confronted.This underlines the importance of seeing the local government reform in thelarger context of the reform of the federal–regional division of competences.For its part the Ministry of Finance does not appear to have envisaged amassive transfer of funds to local government. The head of the budgetdepartment of the Mininstry of Finance, Alexei Lavrov, saw the priorities asbeing first to establish a local government structure where functions wereclearly assigned according to a two-tier structure, then to ring-fence localbudgets from regional interference, then standardize the system for delegatingstate competences to municipal districts. Only then could any seriousexpansion of local budgets take place (part of a wider system of introducingresults-based budgeting across the state sector). 22The intertwining of the Kozak reform agenda with that of the monetizationof social benefits thus led to unintended consequences and suggests thatthere were limitations to what could be achieved by a systematic and rationalreform programme, despite the very substantial scale of legislative changescarried through. This brings us to consider the reform campaign concernedcan be incorporated into a theoretical understanding of the current evolutionof the Russian state.Russian federalism between Gemeinschaft and GesellschaftIn order to analyse the changes brought about in the early years of the Putinpresidency Robinson 23 proposed a framework derived from two sets ofopposed ideal types: absolutist versus constitutional (whether power is concentratedor divided) and bureaucratic (in the Weberian sense) versus patrimonial(whether or not officials are selected through patronage and havepersonal access to the state’s resources. Robinson sees the Yeltsin period,particular the late 1990s, as characterized by constitutional patrimonialism,that in which the state has the least capacity and the least organizationalintegrity, and the injustice and inefficiency of patrimonial regimes, withoutthe certainty and authority of absolutism or the accountability of democracy.Of the four possible combinations constitutional patrimonialism is theleast stable and the least likely to endure. For all Yeltsin’s brinkmanship, 24 it