Performance Management and the Implementation of Landmark Executive Orders: Evidence from Russia’s 2012 May Decrees

Since Carey & Shugart ‘s (1998) seminal work on executive decree authority, the main focus of the academic literature has been to explain when and under what conditions presidents use decrees instead of laws for policy-making depending on their relationship with the assembly. To date, less attention has been paid to what happens after presidents opted for unilateral action. Recent research suggests that bureaucratic responsiveness of agencies to presidential orders is far from guaranteed, especially under conditions of multi-level governance (Kennedy 2015). This paper leverages the so-called ‘May Decrees’ passed by the Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2012 to shed light on bureaucratic incentives for compliance. To explain the variation in implementation across regions by 2018, I conduct a qualitative comparative case study (Slater & Ziblatt 2013). Instead of all 85, I select only those 12 regions that were qualified as ‘donor regions’ by the Ministry of Finance in 2018. I theorize that the degree of implementation should be higher in regions with a higher quality of government, that is with higher bureaucratic capacity, and higher political autonomy (less competitive with a more hierarchical mode of governance and less veto players). The variation in implementation within regions among policy domains, I theorize, is due to the closeness of the respective indicators stipulated in the decrees to the progress already made in the respective field before the decrees were passed and the numeric target regime was introduced.