Exploring Russian governmental budgeting in its context

Purpose – the purpose of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about Russian public sector budgeting in times of change by exploring the emergence of new norms for the Russian central government. Design/methodology/approach – in this paper budgeting is viewed as a social institution. A frame of reference consists of classical neo-institutional theory and its recent incarnation, known as institutional logics approach. Document search, supplemented with in-depth qualitative interviews, represents the main method of gathering data for this paper. Findings – An assiduous endeavor to provide an understanding of an emergence of new Russian government budgeting system is undertaken in this paper. As our evidence indicates, it now represents a kind of hybrid model influenced by the ideas of New Public Management, those ideas stemming from the Russian past, as well as a strong rhetoric of Russian officials aimed at boosting the image of the Russian state as a modern sovereign and independent player. Research limitations/implications – this paper focuses on budgeting provisions issued over the last decade at macro-level and does, therefore have limitations with regard to scope. The findings of the paper may inspire further research on the implementation of described changes at micro-level, including regional and local governments as well as public sector organizations. Originality/value – In line with the existing research on Russian governmental accounting (see e.g. Bourmistrov and Mellemvik, 1999, 2002; Bourmistrov, 2001, 2006; Timoshenko, 2008; Timoshenko and Adhikari, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Adhikari et al., 2012; Bourmistrov and Antipova, 2013), this paper strives to introduce rather unexplored phenomenon of Russian governmental budgeting to international research community. A theoretical contribution is linked to the literature on accounting/budgeting hybrids as a recently emerged way of seeing the outcomes of public sector reforms. The study ensues from viewing national traditions as one of competing logics triggering the reforms along with New Public Management logics. Key words: Russian public sector, budgeting reforms, New Public Management, New Public Governance, Neo-Weberian State, Institutional Logics, hybridization and hybrid models.