The Quest for a Technocratic Utopia in Russian Subnational Governance

Abstract

Technocratic selection could help address two challenges faced by the Russian political regime: the need to prevent the opposition from mobilizing and gaining support through subnational competitively elected offices and the need to ensure popular legitimacy. What we see, though, is technocratic selection either being used for the wrong offices or being applied selectively, rendering it useless or even harmful.