The Issue of Assessing the Effectiveness of the Activities of the Senior Officials of the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Effective activity of public authorities is the basis for stability and development of the state. The accurate assessment of efficiency is of prior importance in identifying the issues in the functioning of public administration. For the unbiased assessment of the activities of the executive bodies of the subjects of the Russian Federation the criteria established in the Presidential Decree No. 68 “On the assessment of the effectiveness of the activities of the highest officials of the subjects of the Russian Federation and the activities of the executive bodies of the subjects of the Russian Federation” are being applied. One of the issues related to the implementation of these criteria consists in the difficulty to correlate the assessment of the effectiveness of the activities of executive authorities of the subjects of the Russian Federation and their actual performance efficiency and quality. The article investigates the efficiency criteria in academic perspective, considering various approaches to the understanding of their essence. The comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the activities of the top officials of two subjects of the Russian Federation — the governors of the Nizhny Novgorod region and Krasnodar Krai in accordance with the single criteria stipulated in the law, enables the authors to support the claim that the level of effectiveness of the heads of the subjects of the Russian Federation varies depending on the achievement of certain indicators.