Conditions and stages of formation of political and administrative assemblies in Siberian cities

The paper examines the conditions and stages of formation of various types of power relations from 1991 to 2021 using the example of a comparative analysis of political processes in Siberian cities. To explain the differences in political trajectories, the author uses, on the one hand, the conceptual apparatus of the theory of assemblages by the Mexican-American researcher M. Delanda and builds his conclusions on the basis of the deductive method, and on the other hand, considers the course and results of election campaigns in the selected cities, inductively constructing ideal-typological models of winning coalitions. The main concept of the study is the “political-administrative assembly”, an autonomous entity consisting of heterogeneous parts of different nature, capable of providing forced coordination of other assemblies based on the legitimate recognition of its right to determine the target priorities of the community, mandatory social standards and to exercise control over their observance. Assemblies differ from each other in their assessments of electoral competition (personification-corporatism) and the transparency of administrative procedures (transparency-aberration). Thus, four models of assemblages are identified, two of which are designated as “Hobbesian patterns”, two as “Locke patterns”. To explain the discrepancy between the processes of formation of various patterns, a “place” hypothesis has been formulated, where the geographical location acts as a condition determining the nature of economic, social and cultural manifestations (a hub city or an administrative center city), which largely sets the parameters of the spatial, infrastructural and information environment of the city in question, which, in addition to the material component, finds its expression in the symbolic environment, the expressive pole (the city coat of arms), becoming the basis of the city’s identity (a trading city, an industrial city, an administrative center). Analysis of election campaigns shows a shift in local political agendas from complexes of local problems (1991–2000) to issues of the local economy (2000–2011) to the articulation of large-scale problems of a national scale at the local level (2011–2021). The latest trends mean the unification of management and the transition to the “Hobbes pattern”, which, within the framework of the chosen theoretical model, inevitably leads to a decrease in the social activity of the population, the impoverishment of the symbolic environment and the weakening of the signal complexes about the state of the infrastructural environment.

city, assemblage, power groups, networks, elites, infrastructure, urban regime, Siberia