№ 6 - 2006
Barsukova S.Yu.
The Power and Business: New Rules of the Game

The author of the article undertakes to analyze the influence of the recent novations – abrogation of electing of governors and transition to a purely proportional system of elections to the RF State Duma – upon mutual relations of business and the power. The author demonstrates that the change of the principle of the formation of the governors contingent personnel and the replacement of the mixed electoral formula by elections exclusively by party lists destroy the mechanisms, long since given a work-out to, of coalescence of business and politics. But, although concentration of authoritative powers in the hands of the federal center, certainly, impedes “seizure of the state” by groups of economic interests, it is not equivalent to the establishment of an “honest competition regime”, for the government starts serving the interests of the business under its control. According to the author’s conclusion, the control over the “strategic branches”, announced by the federal center, means that political influence as resource of competitive struggle, rests only with the economic agents chosen by it. The rest business structures lose the opportunities for lobbying their interests in the power corridors – which, from the author’s point of view, might be welcome, were this “distant separation of business from the power” not selective.