Today, the notion of “right” institutions – ones that are democratic and pro-market - predominate conventional studies of democracy in post-communist countries. The focus is on the articulation or non-articulation of citizens' interests and their ability to influence the state and its decisions. For instance, while studying the city infrastructure in current Russia, most analysts believed that changes in ownership or management style of housing maintenance and utility companies would result in the empowerment of citizens and the creation of civil society. Many studies were developed to explore constraints that inhibit such progress. While this view captures many of the central problems of market and democracy building in Russia today, this study claims that such an approach should be corrected through an examination of the role of things in policy-making.
Employing the “actor-network” approach, it will explore the case of reforms in the administration of the Russian municipal sector. As in other sectors of the Russian economy, the biggest changes included market-oriented reforms that proposed to make people liable for their apartments. Residents, who have become owners of their flats after privatization, are now responsible for the maintenance of their buildings. While the program of reforms included many stages, one of the major steps was the introduction of market-oriented technologies that were expected to re-orient residents’ incentives from collective to individual consumption of utility and housing services.
However, this conventional account misses something important about local politics in the housing and utility sector. For most analysts, the implementation process evolves in a ‘materially free’ environment where the “right” technologies can successfully “teach” consumers to live in a democratic pro-market society. Focusing on financial requirements, they neglect the overall effect of new technology on the implementation of democratic and market policies across Russian cities. Most studies do not account for fact that technological innovations were introduced in the field with the already existing scripts of consumers’ behavior and experts’ power. How do old technologies that promote collective use interact with the new equipment that encourages individual consumption? In this study, I will address these questions by studying changes in Russian urban infrastructure.