«Sleeping reform»: practices for implementing a two-level local self-government system in the city districts

Abstract

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of pilot implementation of a two-level local self-government system in city districts. Amendments to the Federal Law “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation” were presented in 2014, where new types of municipalities – “city district with intra-city division” and “inside-city district” – were introduced. This legislative change was based on the idea of spreading a two-level model in order to bring the deputies closer to voters in large city districts. More than 70 cities had the potential for this reform, but only 3 of them – Chelyabinsk, Samara, and Makhachkala – took advantage of the opportunity. The authors reconstruct the design of local electoral systems in Chelyabinsk, Samara and Makhachkala before and after the reform, and analyze the change in the rate of representation in the reformed city districts in comparison with city districts (which are not municipalities) that are divided into precincts, but have not switched to the two-level local self-government model. Also the basic trends of forming deputies’ bodies as a sub-elite group among political class of the cities are examined. The reform resulted in the expansion of the municipal deputies body. A database of candidates for deputies and deputies from 2009 to 2020 created by the authors gives an opportunity to analyze the ways the collective portrait of the municipal political sub-elite transformed during the reform. The focus of the study is the dilemma of maintaining or abandoning the twolevel system that the regional authorities faced in 2019–2020. The authors answer the question about the reasons for the lack of attempts to scale the results of the reform to other regions or large cities in those regions where the pilot reform options were implemented.