Staying Out of Trouble: Criminal Cases Against Russian Mayors

• Author: Noah Buckley,Ora John. Reuter,Michael Rochlitz,Anton Aisin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211047399
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(9) 1539–1568

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211047399

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Staying Out of Trouble:

Criminal Cases Against

Russian Mayors

Noah Buckley

1,2

, Ora John. Reuter

2,3

,

Michael Rochlitz

4

, and Anton Aisin

2

Abstract

Although repression against elites is a common occurrence in authoritarian

regimes, we know little about which elites are targeted. This paper uses an

original dataset on the prosecution of mayors in large Russian cities to ex-

amine the factors that make elites more likely to be arrested. We argue that in

electoral authoritarian regimes like Russia, regime leaders are reluctant to

arrest popular officials. Such officials command political capital that is useful to

the regime, and arrests of prominent officials can produce popular backlash.

We examine this argument using an original dataset on all arrests of municipal

leaders in Russia’s 221 largest cities between 2002 and 2018. We find that

mayors who won their elections by large margins are less likely to be arrested.

In addition, we document several other substantively important patterns: (1) a

mayor’s professional background is not related to the likelihood of arrest, (2)

opposition mayors are four times more likely to be arrested, and (3) mo-

bilization of votes for the regime is not protective against arrest.

JEL Classifications P16, P30, R59

1

Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

2

Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

3

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

4

University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Michael Rochlitz, Faculty of Business Studies and Economics, University of Bremen, Max-von-

Laue Street 1, Bremen 28359, Germany.

Email: michael.rochlitz@gmail.com

Keywords

authoritarian politics, repression, anti-corruption campaigns, subnational

political elites, Russia

Introduction

Repression of political elites is a common occurrence under autocracy. Office-

holders in authoritarian regimes are much more likely to lose office via force

(i.e., arrest or violence) than are elites in democracies (Svolik, 2009). Sub-

national officials are a particularly frequent target of such repression. Indeed,

in the past 5 years, there have been major arrest campaigns against local

officials in settings as diverse as Venezuela, China, Tanzania,Turkey, Uganda,

and Russia.

1

In this paper, we examine why some subnational elites are

arrested or charged with criminal wrongdoing, while others are not.

There is a vast literature on elite repression under autocracy, but relatively

few empirical studies examine which subnational officials are actually tar-

geted with repression (Lorentzen & Lu, 2018 and Zhu & Zhang, 2017 are two

exceptions). Generally speaking, the literature on elite repression can be

classified into two categories. First, there is scholarship on purges—large-

scale repression campaigns, usually targeted at entire elite groups, factions, or

categories. In addition to a voluminous historical literature describing famous

purges, this literature focuses on uncovering the factors that lead top regime

leaders to launch a purge campaign, usually against members of the security

services or top officials in the central government (Brzezinski, 1958;Bueno de

Mesquita & Smith, 2009;Sudduth, 2017). This literature does not make clear

predictions about which elites will be repressed, nor does it help us understand

patterns of elite repression in “normal”times, outside of well-defined purge

campaigns. We take up both tasks in this paper.

Second, there is a large and growing literature on anti-corruption cam-

paigns, primarily focusing on China (Chen & Kung, 2019;Li, 2019;Li et al.,

2018;Manion, 2016;Pan & Tian, 2020;Wedeman, 2005;2017;Xi et al.,

2020;Zhu et al., 2019). Much of this literature focuses on determining the

purpose of these campaigns. Are they really aimed at stamping out corruption,

or are they merely a tool for leaders to eliminate political threats, consolidate

their power, and strengthen the political legitimacy of the regime? In recent

years, a number of innovative papers have made progress on these questions,

generally coming to the conclusion that all three factors—anti-corruption

efforts, political vendettas, as well as concerns about the public image of the

party—drive the pattern of arrests in China (Lorentzen & Lu, 2018;Zhu et al.,

2019;Zhu & Zhang, 2017).

We adopt a different approach in this paper.We start from the premise that

authoritarian politics is opaque. The decision-making processes of the security

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