Bureaucratic reform and Russian transition: the puzzles of policy-making process

Prior to the discussion of evidence that accounts for the bureaucratic change process in Russia, it is necessary to briefly focus on the dynamics of the policy formulation stage, including the goals and mechanisms employed by the reformers to modernize Russian bureaucracy. This is necessary in order to understand how and why the stage of policy planning influences the results of policy implementation within the subfield of Russian civil service reform.

The current stage of Russian civil service reform (which began in 1999) suggests that the set of actors involved in CSR consisted of (1) policy experts (practitioners and academics) who were engaged in a process of problem identification and agenda-setting; (2) ministers and other career politicians who were engaged in the development of policy options and proposals; (3) Presidential administration (PA)—the key decision-maker concerned with the issue of hierarchical subordination, and finally, (4) the group of policy implementers (career bureaucrats), whose motivation structure, as mentioned earlier, included material and non-material incentives, such as the level of pay or the system of interconnected protections and other possible conditions of their permanent work environment (for more information, see Obolonsky, 2006).

The federal government set generic goals, such as the reduction in the number of civil service employees and the development of legislative bases for the improvement of human resource management procedures (recruitment, education, pay, and promotion of civil service employees). Accordingly, the early Conception of public service reform (Presidential Decree no. 1496, August 15, 2001) offered a long list of policy objectives, focused on the increased level of bureaucratic professionalism, organizational coherency, effectiveness, and efficiency of public bureaucracy.

Since 1999, the organizational core of policy planning process included the Center for Strategic Analysis under the Chairmen of the Government Herman Gref who was a well-known figure of Russian politics. This center, that was in charge of Vladimir Putin’s first presidential campaign, observed the selection of Russia’s executive system appointees and developed comprehensive policy proposals in Russia’s economy, including the reform of state monopolies; the development of favorable environment for Russian business; the reform of Russia’s Central Bank; Russia’s taxation system reform; and finally, the land reform, including the law on the circulation of agricultural land, which the Communist party did not allow to adopt for a long time, fearing that lands were to be plundered.

In early November 2000, the PA instructed the Government, the Administration of the President and the Security Council of the Russian Federation to prepare (by May 1, 2001) and submit proposals for reforming the civil service system. This instruction was followed by the creation of Inter-Agency Working Group, which consisted of the representatives of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Statistics Service, including the First Deputy Head of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, D. A. Medvedev. The head of the first working group was the former advisor to President Yeltsin Mikhail Krasnov. The conception of Public Service Reform (2001) was, therefore, created as a product of joint efforts under the post-Soviet tradition of inter-agency consultations.

Over time, public committees on administrative and civil service reform were split. These committees were headed by different individuals, and as such, were not closely interconnected. For example, committees on public administration were headed by the leading and visible Russian politicians, such as Boris Aleshin Dmitry Kozak, Alexander Zhukov, and Sergei Naryshkin. One of the them, Deputy Head of Presidential Administration, was in charge of relations between the federal center and Russian regions in the federal government, which, in effect, made regional heads subordinate to the Russian president. In contrast, civil service reform committees were composed, mainly, of academic experts, and they were rarely visited by the top-level bureaucrats (for more information, see Barabashev et al., 2003, p. 174).

Governance discourse in the area of CSR (see the list of presidential speeches at http://kremlin.ru) suggests that there have been multiple overlapping considerations for the reform of Russia’s bureaucratic system. One of these has been the deteriorating quality of bureaucratic performance, which progressively undermined public trust in government. The second problem concerned the lack of the state’s operational capacity (closely linked with the lack of hierarchical subordination), threatening the survival of inherited administrative system. In his Annual Address of 2001, President Putin claimed that Russia “will not have Revolutions or Counter-revolutions” (Rossiyskaia Gazeta, 2001, April 4). This claim was accompanied by the discussion of the poor bureaucratic system and was followed by the promise to restore Law and Order in Russian society (Annual Messages and Budget Messages of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, 2000–2018).^{Footnote 2}

The timeline of the policy formulation stage, under Putin, covered nearly 10 years, and it significantly overlapped with the stage of policy implementation, which consisted of the decrees and instructions issued by the President or by the Government. The Conception and the Programs (for the period of 2003–2005; and for the period of 2009–2013) promised to achieve comprehensive bureaucratic reform with the means of maintaining the organizational coherency of civil service institutions, the development of a professional bureaucratic system tailored toward the goals of state capacity and bureaucratic efficiency “based on Russia’s historical, cultural, national and other features” (Conception no. 1496, 2001).

It is also noteworthy, that starting from the early 2000s, the federal reforms in the area of public service and state administration have been guided by the “mixed” strategy, which aimed to “marry” the diverse principles of the neo-Weberian perspective with the principles of the New Public Management paradigm (NPM). The first set of principles of the earliest government package pursued the goal of constraining the discretionary powers of public officials with detailed and narrow regulations. This set of ideas included policy proposals and subsequent choices in favor of regulation and standardization procedures outlining duties and responsibilities of civil servants, as well as their evaluation criteria (this was a long process that took nearly one decade to accomplish with the criteria of evaluation that were not fully applied). The second set of principles encompassed goals such as political decentralization, citizen/customer orientation, community empowerment, and the introduction of market forces in the operation of government bodies. These principles were embraced by the all-encompassing comprehensive public administration reform. The ultimate result of these processes was the introduction of public procurement reform, the opening of multifunctional centers for service delivery, and the development of e-governance projects designed to establish mechanisms through which the individual responsibility of civil servants could be observed (World Bank, 2006a).

It is well-known that the New Public Management has traditionally focused on administrative modernization, including performance-motivated public management and the use of integrated economic, sociological, and other advanced conceptual models. These ideas have provided a good starting point for the development of innovative policy proposals. However, the realization of innovative policy objectives required significant bureaucratic capacity to “absorb” policy changes. Some projects, such as the introduction of e-governance systems (electronic service delivery mechanisms) lead to the increased accountability of civil servants. Others, such as the introduction of public procurement system, resulted in aggravated corruption that has been difficult to track considering the scale of resources and actors involved in this process (for more information, see World Bank, 2006b).

The Implementation stage of civil service reform, starting from the early 2000s, consisted of the enactment of Law on the System of State Service no. 58 (2003) and Civil Service Law no. 79 (2004), which have been accompanied by the list of regulatory procedures (Presidential Decrees) that aimed to enforce new legislation. One of the major criticisms of the new legislation, in this context, has been the development of a “mixed”, rather than merit-based system of public administration, and the unreasonable number of exceptions to the rule of merit-based recruitment that it included (see Article 22 of Law no. 79), which has been the most significant “trade-off” effects among contradictory policy goals. To exemplify the nature of clandestine conflict surrounding the reform, one of interviewees engaged in policy planning (an expert form the Center for Strategic Analysis) observes that various committees of State Duma introduced 245 amendments to the Draft Law on the System of State Service) in order to clarify the principles of merit-based system of state bureaucracy. However, only 39 amendments were recommended by the parent committee responsible for the consideration of this bill (Committee on Federal Affairs and Regional Policy) for acceptance (for more information, see Yuzhakov, 2005).^{Footnote 3} The amendments covered such areas as recruitment procedures, transparency, professionalism, service-oriented culture, merit-based pay and promotion systems (Ibid.).

The enactment of Law no. 58 has been accompanied by the discussion of polar opposing ideas, such as the notorious policy proposal to exclude the principle of non-partisanship—introduced in effort to overcome the post-Soviet legacy. A remarkable feature of this discussion was that the hearing process occurred mainly from the standpoint of the presidential program. The Chairman of the Committee on Federal Affairs and Regional policy would consistently ask of the draft offered to the State Duma is consistent with the Conception issued by the Presidential Administration (the key issue on agenda of policy-makers). The Federal Law was subsequently approved, without any significant challenges, but the State Duma, the Federal Council and the President in <2 months of April–May 2003. Political parties that introduced amendments and subsequently approved the new legislation were Unity (Edinstvo 98,8% deputies), OVR (Otechestvo Vsya Rossiya (100%), Liberal Democratic Party (100%), Group of Deputies of “Narodny Deputat” (100%), “Regions of Russia” (57, 4%), and “Yabloko” (29, 4%).

In April 2004, State Duma rejected the Code of Ethical Conduct introduced by individual members of State Duma. Interestingly, one of the earlier versions of the Code of Ethics had been introduced by the President himself in 2002. This piece of legislation—initially backed by the Union of Right Forces—did not enjoy full support of the State Duma, and it was subsequently rejected by the lower chamber of the Russian parliament in anticipation of Draft Law on Civil Service Reform offered by the Presidential Administration (Barabashev and Klimenko, 2010).

Federal Law no. 79 (Civil Service Law), which dealt with the core issues of civil service, took nearly 9 months to develop (starting from September 2003 until July 2004)—partly due to the changes in State Duma (elections in December 2003) and recommendations made by the head committee during the first round of Parliamentary hearings. This new piece of legislation defined civil service as a professional occupation, which is paid by the Russian budget. Employment conditions were contract-based and performance-oriented. Civil service tenure was no longer guaranteed. Overall, civil service system was reshuffled to comply with the hybrid nature of public management system, which was based on a combination of old (table of ranks) and new (performance management) principles.

Interview findings (Expert Interviews by Author (anonymous), 2010–2013) identify the following major features of CSR policy cycle. One of these has been the lack of agreement among Russia’s academic experts and senior bureaucrats (at the time considered the top-level civil servants) concerning the goals and values underlying bureaucratic modernization effort. The most explicit, in this context, was the ideational split concerning the principles of bureaucratic organization, including the principles of bureaucratic recruitment, promotion and security of tenure.

For example, in view of the ideational split that was driven by the colliding interests and institutional mandates, some Ministries participating in the policy formulation stage, such as The Ministry of Labor, advocated the need to establish a career-based civil service system with clear lines of subordination, a detailed analysis of civil servants’ duties and career incentives that promote the idea of life-long employment. The Ministry of Economic Development, by contrast, advocated the need to incentivize civil servants to work more productively, thus recommending the use of short-term contracts and performance-based pay to improve the operational capacity of civil service organizations (Former Employee of the Ministry of Labour of the Russian Federation (feredal level), interview by author, Moscow 2010). The final version of Law no. 79 emerged as a result of consensus among various ideas and interests involved in the reform. Some of the most popular ideas (such as performance-based pay) became part of Law, though conditions for the enforcement of relevant implementation procedures were not created.

The second feature of policy formulation stage that was observed has been the so-called “expedited decision-making” characterized by the lack of public discussion and the tendency of the Russian government to hold its meetings behind the closed doors. This style of policy-making process has been described by interviewees as a notorious part of Russia’s tradition marked by the tendency to “jump over the necessary stages” and limit the scope of public discussion surrounding important decisions (Academic Expert, Higher School of Economics, interview by author, Moscow 2010). However, the choice of such an approach was not purely coincidental, as it revealed the PA’s efforts to outmaneuver the opposition and advance the version of the law according to its own preferences.

An authoritative source occupying the leading post in one of Russia’s think tanks suggests that the key features of Russia’s decision-making process, at the time, included the so-called “departmental” or “agency-based” approach to public administrative reforms. This approach produced useful, yet uncoordinated reform efforts, and as such, resulted in the development of incoherent legislation:

Given our relatively weak civil society and political parties, the main forum for representation and reconciliation of interests is provided by the executive authorities. Accordingly, government agencies and departments are the main actors involved in shaping the political agenda, as well as in its implementation. But the departmental (agency) approach to reforms is limited by definition. A radical agency project is a breakthrough in one relatively narrow area and is out of line with the general state of the public sector and public management. Such a breakthrough, first, is rarely successful on its own; second, it tends to produce unexpected effects in related areas; and third, it implies “bridge building” between the sector under reform and its environment. Such “bridges” include the numerous amendments to laws, which make them internally inconsistent. In addition, any agency, whether reform-oriented or conservative, tends to try to increase its influence and facilitate the performance of its functions (Member of an Expert Committee within the Russian Government (cross-affiliated, senior role), interview by author, Moscow 2010).

Another authoritative source (former adviser to President Yeltsin), as well, suggests that Russian political institutions—the way they were formed throughout the years of Yeltsin’s Presidency—“have narrowed the scope of freedom for actors other than those from state executive” (Former Advisor to President Yeltsin, interview by author, Moscow 2010). This view is supported by the leading academic experts on Russia pointing out that the model of decision-making, in this country, presents a significant challenge for the possibility to reach an optimal developmental outcome (for more information, see Huskey, 1999).

All things considered, the dynamic of policy formulation stage in the area of CSR has been driven by an increasingly complex reform strategy and the lack of consensus among reform-oriented and “status-quo” interests (Obolonskiy, 2006). The body of expert proposals set the stage for comprehensive reform program (experts acted on the demand of the Federal government seeking expert advice). However, the course of events, which accompanied the creation of Law no. 79, revealed the difficulties of policy proposals that were passing the stage of Parliamentary hearings (Interviews, 2010). The discussion of civil service reform, both in public and in the State Duma (lower chamber of Russian Parliament), during the early years of Putin’s presidency, has been limited (Barabashev et al., 2003). The development of civil service procedures occurred in an expedited mode, which revealed the PA’s control over the stage of agenda-setting in its effort to outmaneuver opposition. Similar developments, at the time, were observed with respect to the Russian anti-corruption legislation package (see Dmitriev, 2006).

Ultimately, many norms contained in Law no. 79 (see Article No. 11 (‘‘The System of Ranks’’), Article no. 31 (‘‘Organizational Restructuring of Civil Service Institutions’’), Article no. 33 (‘‘Termination of Employment Regulations’’), and Article no. 50 (‘‘The System of Pay and Reimbursement’’) were so generic that they required additional clarifications and improvements and took the federal government more than a decade to pass (for more information, see Tikhomirov and Gorokhov, 2009).