Local government in Russia: expectations for major changes or selective adjustments?

The purpose of the article is to provide a scientific understanding of trends and problems of the functioning of the institute of local government in Russia and to define scientific tasks for improving its conceptual foundations. These issues became particularly relevant and important at the beginning of 2020 in relation to the adoption of the Law of the Russian Federation no. 1-FKZ on amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, dated March 14, 2020 (changes to the Constitution will come into force if a positive decision is taken during the all- Russian vote, which will take place in 2020), and the President’s task to develop new Foundations of state policy of the Russian Federation in the area of local government development until 2030 in 2020-2021. To achieve this goal, we used economic, statistical, and comparative analysis, methods of analysis, synthesis, generalization, and monographic method. The analysis revealed that Russian municipalities are characterized by low financial and economic independence (the share of tax and non-tax revenues in total revenues of the country’s all local budgets amounted to only 34.1% in 2019); in many entities of the Russian Federation, there is a trend toward the transformation of municipal areas into urban and municipal districts with the elimination of the settlement management level; there is the lack of qualified personnel in local government bodies due to the low level of remuneration and high personal responsibility in solving local issues. It is justified that changes, introduced to Chapter 8 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation titled “Local Government”, will not directly lead to significant changes in the functioning of this public institution. The results of this work may be used in federal and regional authorities’ activities and serve as a basis for further studies on this topic.