Network approach is one of the most popular political science methodologies used to study and explain policy-making. Although, many researchers agree that the theory mainly works for analysis of policies in Western democracies as they are open, transparent and engage wide range of actors. Elite networks or social networks in autocracies also rather often appear in the focus of political research, but just few studies are devoted to policy networks in the states that a considered to be not democratic. We assume that policy networks emerge as a result of deliberation, and horizontal collaboration occurs just within democratic institutional framework. Nevertheless, in our research project dedicated to urban governance in Russian cities we managed to identify policy networks that appear in authoritarian political administrative setting. The emergence of these networks in civil society domain was determined by two basic factors: (1) protest mobilization during the electoral cycle of 2011-2012 engaged a lot of active citizens who created a number of networked civic initiatives; (2) public authorities involve NGOs and civic activists into collaboration in order to develop and legitimate policies. However, the state actors hold the key positions in the networks and set the “rules of play”. Applying the game theory we see that network actors develop different models of actions which depend on the scope of various circumstances. The results of the study show that actors switch between market (competition) and network (collaboration) strategies. For example, one of the findings of our study reveals that some actors arrange short-time coalitions or long-term cartels to obtain unallocated resources. This is especially evident in cases with the public money (grants or state bids). Then these actors take the monopoly to redistribute resources to the whole network. We explain the discrepancy between policy network theory and our observations by the gap between institutional and cultural contexts in consolidated democracies and transitional or authoritarian states. We also conclude that informal rules and personal ties, which lie in the basis of institutional linkages, also give significant impact on the networking and policy outcomes.
