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Understanding the Dismissal of Subnational Executives in Russia (2016-2022)

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Boyars and Bureaucrats

professionalization and centralization. The former is applied in regions that are already under the Kremlin’s effective control and is based on the performance of governors. Through the latter process, the Kremlin seeks to remove governors with independent sources of authority, regardless of their performance in office. These decisions, instead, are based on changes in the balance of power between the center and the region in question.

Under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, the structure of Russian federalism has undergone numerous changes. Despite Russia’s federal structure, Putin has been able to establish a hierarchical system of regional governance that has given him extensive control over subnational executives. In the decade preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin used this to transform the gubernatorial corps from a collection of semi-independent regional political bosses to a disciplined cadre of career bureaucrats. This was accomplished thanks to an unprecedented number of gubernatorial resignations between 2016 and 2022. This thesis seeks to explain this turnover using an original dataset of 67 dismissals in 82 regions. I argue that the dismissals represent two separate processes

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