This doctoral dissertation research grant assess the question of whether or not the ethnic composition of a given federal region affects its ability to successfully bargain with federal leaders. More specifically, does the ability of regional leaders in the Russian Federation to mobilize citizens along ethnic lines enhance their relative bargaining power vis a vis Moscow, and does this increase in bargaining power affect their ability to successfully bargain with the central government? Intergovernmental bargaining is an important part of all federal systems. This is especially the case in ethnic federations where regions have divergent interests on may dimensions. Intergovernmental bargaining affects the prospects for macro-economic stability as well as the formal political autonomy of the federal regions. Consequently, scholarly understanding of the bases of regional bargaining power, especially the ethnic bases, has profound implications for understanding and assessing the prospects for regional peace and stability in the Russian Federation, as well as in multi-ethnic federal states more generally. While research has been done which addresses the ability of regional elites to mobilize citizens along ethnic lines and how intergovernmental bargaining affects everything from the redistribution of economic resources to the political status of regional governments, there has been almost no work which has attempted to examine how the ability to mobilize citizens increases or decreases the ability of regional leaders to successfully bargain with the central governments. By making clear this link, this research improves our understanding of how the strategies employed and outcomes anticipated by regional leaders in ethnic federations differ from the strategies and outcomes we would expect to see in federations which are not based upon ethnic divisions. Since many of the theoretical frameworks employed by both policy analysts and scholars to grapple with the problems faced by multi-ethnic federations are based upon theories of non-ethnic federations, an understanding of how these frameworks must be modified to fit multi-ethnic federations is of tremendous importance. This dissertation research addresses this question through a combination of cross-regional statistical analysis and case study research. Using statistical methods especially well-suited to deal with problems encountered in the Russian case (small number of cases, non-random sampling, missing data), it is shown that variations in bargaining power has an important effect on the distribution of net transfer payments to that region. Having demonstrated the general importance of ethnic mobilization, interview and archival data drawn from case studies in Tatarstan and Nizhinii Novgorod is used to flesh out and elaborate the ways in which regional elites are able to mobilize citizens and how this bolsters the bargaining power of these elites vis a vis the central government.
