ABSTRACT
In comparative politics, the claim that changing institutions changes the behavior of the actors that operate within these institutions is not particularly controversial. Indeed, institutional reform in post-Soviet Russia has been implemented with the understanding that democratic institutional change should produce concomitant societal and elite behavioral change necessary to bring about a consolidated democracy. Yet the experience of regional government performance in the first Russian republic 1 indicates that while changing institutions does indeed change elite political behavior, this change is not always in line with our expectations of the political outcomes that the imposition of democratic institutions should bring. Preexisting norms of behavior derived from the remnants of the former planned economy and command administration clearly influence the behavior of new institutions.
