Issue ? 46. Oсtober 2014

Urban Political Regimes: The Coordination of Intra-Elite Interactions in Industrial Cities

Ph.D., Associate Professor, Deputy Director, Institute of Career Planning, Siberian State Industrial University, Novokuznetsk, Russian Federation.
E-mail: pustovoit1963@gmail.com

The article explores the problem of formation and development of urban political regimes — a relatively stable combination of high-resource actors operating on the local level in the framework of formal and informal norms of policy implementation. Building on the tradition of American sociology of power (a special place belongs here to K. Stone) and Russian studies of urban communities, the author develops a conceptual framework and suggests considering the power relationships in the continuum of “control — coordination”. On the example of post-Soviet political history of large industrial center, the author studies the mechanisms of formation and dynamics of power groups, as well as the conditions for intra-elite interactions. Based on the analysis of newspaper articles, expert surveys and statistical data the characteristic of different periods of political life is given. The complex internal and external factors affecting the formation of a “coalition of control” and displacing alternative coordination mechanisms is chosen.

Keywords

Urban political regime, сoalition, elite.