Constitutions, Regulations, and Taxes: Contradictions of Different Aspects of Decentralization

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutionalregulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a singledataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country anda variety of indicators. It finds no robust correlation between different decentralizationaspects; moreover, three processes of devolution appearing in the same country at the sametime seem to be driven by different (though partly overlapping) forces. Hence, a specificaspect of decentralization is hardly able to serve as a proxy for another one or for the overalldecentralization process.