Fairly Balanced" or Independent: Problematization of the Discourse on Consultative Bodies in the Russian and American Administrative Traditions

The article deals with the problem of reflecting the national administrative tradition in the design and activities of advisory/ consultative bodies under executive authorities. Despite the fact that the number and importance of such bodies are constantly growing worldwide, there is practically no comparative analysis of the functioning of such bodies in different administrative traditions. The article fills this gap on the basis of a comparative analysis of the discourse on advisory bodies in the United States and the Russian Federation. The materials for the analysis were legal acts, expert literature prepared by the authorities and academic research. The author put forward the hypothesis that problems that are consistently reproduced in the discourse of advisory bodies, be it American advisory committees or Russian public councils, reflect the national administrative specifics and prove to be fundamentally unresolved within the framework of the given administrative system. Based on the analysis of the Federal Act on Advisory Committees (FACA) of 1972, as well as works about the practice of its enforcement, it was shown that in the US, advisory committees act as a mechanism for obtaining and using an expert knowledge accumulated by civil society. Therefore, the central problem of discourse is the question of the ratio of professional experts who are carriers of specialized (including scientific) knowledge and "lay experts" who have life experience related to this field, including experience of protecting their interests. It is shown that this problem has not received a satisfactory solution. In the Russian Federation, advisory bodies are inscribed in a fundamentally different government context. An analysis of the Russian discourse on public councils, including federal and regional legislation (on the example of the Sverdlovsk Region) showed that the main objective of public councils is to monitor the activities of executive bodies (that is, the function that the legislative bodies exercise in the US). Therefore, the main problem is the problem of independence of public councils from the authorities under which they function. This problem is solved in the spirit of the Russian administrative tradition through monitoring the formation and activity of public councils by the structure external to the executive authorities. The role of such a structure is played by Public Chambers of all levels. Based on the analysis of the activities of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation on "resetting" public councils under federal executive bodies (2015--2017) and the activities of the Public Chamber of the Sverdlovsk Region on "resetting" public councils under regional executive bodies (2017--2018), the author came to the conclusion that the problem has not received a satisfactory solution yet. The study conducted by the author shows that the problem that appears in the discourse on advisory/consultative bodies as a key issue and is constantly reproduced in public discussions and in the process of lawmaking and law enforcement depends on a whole range of factors that determine the nature of the national administrative tradition: the type of state structure, the nature of the political regime, the dominant type of administrative culture, etc.

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