Constitutions, Regulations, and Taxes: Contradictions of Different Aspects of Decentralization

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, post-constitutional regulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a single dataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country. It finds virtually no correlation between different decentralization aspects; moreover, three processes of devolution appearing in the same country at the same time seem to be driven by different (though partly overlapping) forces. Hence, a specific aspect of decentralization is hardly able to serve as a proxy for another one or for the overall decentralization process.