The paper provides a brief survey of the key contributions to the studies of the federalism and regionalism in transition states, specifically the countries of the Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. It covers the dynamics of the Russian federalism and decentralization in...

An important but often neglected factor influencing the changes in power relations in Eurasia is the development of center-periphery relations in individual countries. Domestic and international politics are never clearly separated, especially in the emerging post-Soviet states, which still...

The paper compares the development of two institutional systems organizing the intergovernmental relations in the former Soviet Union: Russian federalism and post-Soviet regional integration. In spite of common origins, random selections of actors and common development trends in the first...

The aim of the paper is to understand the specifics of the interaction of two models of regional economic integration co-existing in Eastern Europe: the post-Soviet integration and the cooperation with the EU. The paper claims that institutional competition between integration projects may...

Although decentralization is often modeled as an outcome of bargaining over rents and poli-cies, intuitively it seems possible that public statements, symbols and status often have a great impact on this process. The paper studies the relative importance of the “real” political actions...

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutional regulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization - using a single dataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country and a variety of...

The growing research on fiscal and political federalism in economics (as well as rational choice political science) basically shares two main assumptions regarding federal institutions: it takes democratic and symmetric federations as the reference point. Democracy means that the decision making...

In a centralized federation, where tax rates and taxation rules are set by the federal government, manipulating the thoroughness of tax auditing and the effectiveness of tax collection could be attractive for regional authorities because of a variety of reasons. These range from tax competition...

The paper discusses the relative importance of the 'real' political actions versus the changes of symbolic nature in the bargaining over devolution, studying the case of personnel decentralization in security agencies in Russia in 2000-2007. While in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin regional...