David Szakonyi’s Politics for Profit: Business, Elections, and Policymaking in Russia examines the reasons why Russian businesspeople run for regional legislatures and how they behave once in office. He argues that businesspeople enter politics as a nonmarket strategy to increase the profitability of their firms and to protect their firms from potential threats. Firm leaders become directly involved in politics when they cannot count on indirect means of influencing politics, like lobbying and campaign donations, to advance their interests.

Szakonyi argues that this strategy is common in middle-income countries due to the “commitment problem”; namely, business-funded politicians and parties are disloyal and unreliable after they are elected. The more competitive the economic and political environment, and the less institutionalized and trustworthy local parties are, the greater the need for businesspeople candidacy. That said, there are significant costs associated with serving in the legislature in terms of time and the expense of a political campaign. These costs, however, are offset by important opportunities in addition to passing legislation favorable to one’s firm or the business sector more broadly. For example, a deputy can request investigations and costly audits of a competitor, especially if the competing firm’s leader has not secured office him- or herself. Szakonyi finds instances of an “arms race” emerging between firms as they compete for direct political influence.

The book also presents evidence that businesspeople candidacy is more likely when parties are weak and a region is less wealthy. The analysis also shows that businesspeople in Russia prefer to run in single-member districts rather than compete to win a spot on party lists. Not only do single-member district seats offer greater political independence but they are usually less costly than “buying” a place on a party list. In highly competitive environments, parties hold informal auctions for rank on their party lists, which can be both expensive and unpredictable.

After exploring the strategies and practices of businesspeople candidates, the book turns to the question of how businesspeople legislators behave when in office. Do these legislators run governments like a business or for business? The book argues the latter. In office they advance the interests of the business sector at the expense of the voting publics, preferring to allocate resources to “economic infrastructure” like physical infrastructure or low corporate taxes, rather than to “social infrastructure” such as education and health care. Because their policies often skew toward the interests of economic elites rather than of the electorate, Szakonyi recommends that governments adopt strategies to protect the public from businesspeople capturing the legislature and advancing their own material interests. In the conclusion, the book argues in favor of laws that require divestiture of businesspeople when in office, rather than laws that allow for blind trusts.

Politics for Profit characterizes political behavior as entirely transactional and material in nature. In this story, participation in politics is not driven by ideology or identity, and certainly not public welfare, except in the most instrumental sense—as a way to win votes in the next election. Firm loyalty is strong, and businesspeople once in office do not “shirk” or “defect.” They advance their own firm’s interests and are not bought off by a competing firm once elected. Businesspeople candidates are unidimensional in this study; they are utility self-maximizing agents, with utility understood in terms of the welfare of the firm they led when they ran for office.

Politics for Profit has many strengths. First, it asks interesting and important questions about the intersection of regional politics and regional economies in Russia. The book offers valuable contributions to the theoretical literatures on state capture, corruption, democratization, regional politics, and political and economic development in middle-income countries. A second major strength is the author’s impressive collection of data, which are drawn from existing databases, generated through original surveys, or scraped from the web. Through extensive and careful analysis, Szakonyi provides a wealth of evidence to support a series of interrelated arguments. He draws on an original dataset of 41,471 candidates in 83 regional legislatures over a seven-year period and identifies the links between these candidates and firms using another database of firm registrations. He supplements this massive pool of data with survey questions of businesspeople at 654 firms on their participation in elections. Szakonyi also conducted 70 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors in three regions (Tomsk, Ryazan, and Perm) with varied economic structures. The author’s creative synthesis of different sources of data and his rich analysis of political and economic activity in Russia’s regions reveal his sophistication in accessing data from publicly available, underexamined sources. As a result of this meticulous work, Szakonyi pushes the boundaries of empirical work in the study of Russian regional politics.

A third strength is the book’s focus on subnational politics in understanding important trends in Russian political development. Political science research on Russia offers extensive analysis of Russia’s federal government, national institutions, and President Putin, providing valuable insights into Russia’s authoritarian shift. Politics for Profit instead takes a deep dive into regional legislatures, and its findings serve as an important reminder to students of Russia that electoral contestation at the regional level is meaningful. Although Politics for Profit intends to highlight the self-dealing by businesspeople deputies—and even quantifies how profitable this strategy is, with a 15% profitability bump for firms with CEOs in office—it also sheds light on the real political contestation occurring at the regional level. One curious implication of the analysis is that businesspeople seek to capture seats in the legislature, and do so through a range of political parties, because the regional legislatures actually matter for setting the rules of local business activity. Thus, while political scientists debate whether Russia is authoritarian, competitive authoritarian, or some other hybrid authoritarian regime type, this book suggests that electoral competition at the subnational level remains a meaningful arena through which actors compete to advance their interests.

An emphasis on regional democratic practices may seem like an odd takeaway from research that finds that as many as 40% of legislators served as the director of a firm at the time of their campaign and that, once in office, do not advance the public’s interest. However, Politics for Profit also reminds us that businesspeople deputies are not simply doing the bidding of President Vladimir Putin or United Russia; they rely on a range of political parties and seek to pursue their own goals. Furthermore, when running for and serving in office, these deputies must go to battle with other deputies with competing interests. To overlook these practices at the regional level is to miss important dynamics in Russian subnational democratic development and aspects of the overall political economy regime in Russia today.