Patron-Client Relations in the Recruitment Processes of the Subnational Elite in Russia (2012-2023).

Informal practices in the Russian political system have been studied for a long time. One of these practices is patronage, presented in the format of a mutually beneficial patron-client relationship with a significant asymmetry of resources. An important feature of patronage is its variability over time. Patronage is difficult to study, so many researchers focus on the highest level of power, ignoring regional political elites. In my work last year, I showed the importance of patronage as a separate factor in the process of recruiting governors, but it is also necessary to take into account the temporality of this phenomenon. In this research, I make an attempt to model patronage as one of the factors of elite recruitment at the regional level of government, taking into account the variability of patronage in the specified time period. There are two stable quantitative approaches to analyzing the impact of patronage - network and regression analysis. In this research, I propose a combination of methods in the form of using the results of network analysis to obtain individual predictors for the regression model. In addition, the results of network analysis become the basis for hypotheses, which helps to visualize data and pay attention to quantitative measures of the network graph. According to the results of the work, it was revealed that patronage is significant in its various manifestations, reflected through the metrics of the network graph. For example, it is crucial for how many patron-client relationships, a particular actor in the network is a link. This allows us to draw more general theoretical conclusions about the dynamics of the patronage structure and its impact on the "survival" of governors in office during the period considered in the work.