Tev D. Regional’naya administrativnaya elita: sotsial’no-professional’nyye istochniki rekrutirovaniya i kar’yera [Regional administrative elite: socio-professional sources of recruitment and careers]. Vlast’ i elity [Power and Elites], 2022, 9 (2): 146–171. (in Russian)

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Abstract

The article deals with the socio-professional sources of recruitment and the careers of members of the regional administrative elite. The empirical basis of the study is the biographical database of 464 high-ranking officials of ten regions of Russian Federation. The study revealed that the dominant trend in the careers of administrators is bureaucratic professionalization: by the time they took their current position, the vast majority of them had already worked in administrative positions for more or less a long time. Moreover, the professional closeness of recruitment of the regional administrative elite is increasing. Outside the administrative sphere, the main supplier of regional officials is business, the top management of commercial organizations. However, there is a trend towards a  weakening of plutocratic recruitment. In turn, legislative bodies, primarily regional legislatures, are an insignificant channel for recruitment of the administrative elite (and their role as a supplier of officials has declined since the mid–2000s), which is not surprising, given that they are usually rather weak political institutions, almost completely dependent on the executive branch and virtually unable to control it. Finally, the regional administrative elite is characterized by a high degree of social closeness: it is dominated by people from high-status socio-professional groups and there are practically no persons who in their previous careers occupied positions belonging to the lower classes. In general, the level of social class inequality in access to the highest administrative positions in the regions is high, and the opportunities for vertical mobility are limited.