Intergovernmental bargaining in multilevel autocracies: the case of the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper studies intergovernmental bargaining in multilevel electoral autocracies, focusing on the case of the 2018 FIFA World Cup held in Russia. Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 14 cases reveals that well-connected political elites were able to secure the right for their regions to host the championship and, as a result, to receive additional transfers from the centre. While previous studies find that intergovernmental bargaining in multilevel electoral autocracies is determined by the ability of sub-national elites to mobilize voters, this study shows that regional elites’ political connections shape the distribution of politically sensitive transfers. However, as control over the electoral arena remains vital for national regime survival, it is politically connected elites who are also able to deliver electoral support that render the best service to the regime. These results capture the complexity in the functioning of multilevel authoritarian systems and suggest that intergovernmental bargaining may contribute to the longevity of the national regime.

KEYWORDS:

• federalism
• territorial politics
• multilevel governance
• authoritarianism
• Russia
• Qualitative Comparative Analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank participants of the Second Ghent Russia Colloquium, the BOFIT research seminar, the 14th CEU Annual Doctoral Conference, the 8th Annual ICSID Conference as well as the anonymous referees and the journal editor for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Supporting data including descriptive statistics, raw data and calibrated data set, additional tables and figures and the results of robustness tests are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SF14TU

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Riker (1964, p. 12) argued that the two necessary conditions of the federal bargain are ‘the expansion condition’ and ‘the military condition.’ He also suggested that these two conditions together are sufficient (Riker, 1964, p. 13). However, at that time Riker was not able to assess the hypothesis of sufficiency and asserted only the hypothesis of necessity studying ‘all the instances of the creation of a federalism’ (Riker, 1964, p. 13).

2 At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge that intergovernmental interactions in federal democracies can take place in informal setting as well. I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.

3 Discretionary grants (dotatsii) include equalization grants (dotatsii na vyravnivanie) and extraordinary bailout grants (dotatsii na sbalansirovannost). The former are granted to underdeveloped and poor regions to reduce the gaps in the regions’ revenue per capita and their size is formula-based. The latter are allocated for multiple purposes, therefore, their distribution is subjected to intergovernmental bargaining.

4 Subsidies (subsidii) provide financing, for example, to industries as well as enterprises seen by the federal government as important and worthy of additional support.

5 http://archive.government.ru/special/docs/4066/index.html.

6 The report is available at https://www.minsport.gov.ru/documents/.

7 The register is available at: https://data.gov.ru/opendata/7703771271-typesportobjects.

8 www.kremlin.ru.

9 State Duma is the lower house of the Russian parliament.

10 The database and the codebook are available at https://iims.hse.ru/en/csid/databases.

11 The descriptive statistics are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SF14TU

12 The data set is available at https://popularmobilization.net/about/.

13 The reports are available at https://kprf.ru/actions/kprf/114345.html.

14 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this measure.

15 The raw data and the calibrated data set are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SF14TU

16 For the analysis, the R packages ‘QCA’ (Dusa, 2019) and ‘Set Methods’ (Oana & Schneider, 2018) were used.

17 Additional tables and figures are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SF14TU

18 Their number is equal to $2^n$, where n is the number of conditions included in the analysis.

19 PRI means ‘proportional reduction in inconsistency’; it shows how much it helps to know whether a given X is a subset of Y and not a subset of not Y (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012, p. 242).

20 The results of the robustness tests are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/SF14TU

21 Between 2005 and 2012, governors in Russia were appointed by the president.

22 Following the non-selection of Krasnodar, Galitsky still spent around 300 million U.S. dollars on the construction of a new stadium. Its construction was finished in 2016–two years before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Russia (RIA News Sport, 2018).