Models of municipal management and personnel exchange with regions: are the implemented practices effective?

Abstract

The reform of the municipal system carried out since 2010 has revealed changes in the models of power organization and the growing interest of the federal authorities in the formation of reliable managerial personnel at the local level. The analysis of biographies of heads of municipalities in 80 subjects of the Federation, conducted by the authors of the article, showed that the state authorities actively use the municipal level as a personnel reserve. The study systematizes data on the choice of municipalities of one of the three main management models - the model of an elected head, a single-headed model of a city manager and a two-headed model. The article shows that the process of recruiting the municipal elite in Russia since 2010 has been intertwined with the formation of the state bureaucracy and the deputy corps, and the regional and municipal elite have become inseparable from each other, which corresponds to the peculiarities of the functioning of regional political regimes in Russia, where there are no two independent levels of power. The paper uses statistical methods to confirm the expediency of switching to non-electoral models for determining municipal heads from the point of view of stabilizing the political regime. The authors conclude that the reform of local self-government contributed to the formation of a unified system of public power in Russia before the constitutional reform of 2020, and the merging of the regional and municipal elite has a stabilizing political effect, playing an important role in strengthening the existing political regime.