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Top‐Down Self‐Organization: State Logics, Substitutional Delegation, and Private Governance in Russia
Author(s) -
Hedberg Masha
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.46
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1468-0491
pISSN - 0952-1895
DOI - 10.1111/gove.12140
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , delegation , corporate governance , state (computer science) , politics , incentive , government (linguistics) , public administration , private sector , extant taxon , economics , law and economics , language change , public economics , business , political science , market economy , law , finance , management , economic growth , art , linguistics , philosophy , literature , algorithm , evolutionary biology , computer science , biology
This study investigates the counterintuitive emergence of self‐regulation in the R ussian construction sector. Despite its proclivity for centralizing political authority, the government acted as the catalyst for the delegation of regulatory powers to private industry groups. The article argues that a factor little considered in extant literature—namely, a weak and corrupt bureaucracy—is key to explaining why the normally control‐oriented executive branch began to promote private governance despite industry's preference for continued state regulation. The article's signal contribution is to theoretically explain and empirically demonstrate how a government's prior inability to establish intrastate control over an ineffective and bribable public bureaucracy creates incentives for political authorities to search for alternative means for policy implementation outside of existing state agencies. These findings are important for understanding the impetus and logic behind particular regulatory shifts in countries where the state apparatus is both deficient and corrupt.