The peculiarities of the population’s attitudes towards the regional legislative bodies and their activities are discussed in the paper. The author claims that in contemporary political science the assumption concerning the decline in legislative bodies representation efficiency that is ensured by the functioning of parliaments and the political parties that form those bodies, have become popular. It is caused to some extend by development of management approaches to administration and also by changing requirements of the multi-partite society and ways of determining the agenda. In Russia, the crisis in the system of representation is determined by the peculiarities of the political transformation, during which the representative bodies of every level have not got a significant influence on the allocation of resources, so they have not become important to the public and have not been supported by it. The increasing introduction of administrative technologies into the electoral procedures, as well as the public relative ignorance of the powers, activities and principles of forming the legislative bodies, contributes to lower public confidence in the regional legislative bodies. Although the legislative assemblies regularly inform the public about their activities, people remain indifferent to those messages, thus forming ‘a vicious circle’ in the Russian system of representation.