№ 6 - 2003
Kononenko P.B.
Political Factors of Constitutional Construction in the Republics of the Russian Federation

The article essays a comparative study of regional political processes, based on methodological synthesis of neo-institutionalism and rational choice theory. The immediate subject of the research is the scope of authorities residing in the Power’s executive and legislative branches, as determined by the Constitutions of the Republics within the Russian Federation. On analyzing the constitutional design established in 18 subjects of the RF in the first half of the 1990s, the author comes to the conclusion that the correlation of the executive and legislative branches of power in the regions depends, to a great extent, on the respective type of regional political game. As the results obtained show, the constitutional design turns out to be symmetrical, and the scope of authorities enjoyed by the head of the executive power and by the parliament, to be approximately equal when the game goes on with no dominating actor. In the meantime, the research also shows that in the opposite case, when there is a dominating actor in the game, the formal-institutional characteristics of the system are influenced by the factor of the local leader’s belonging to regional elite.