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Russia: Nationalization Achieved Through Electoral and Institutional Engineering

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Regional and National Elections in Eastern Europe

Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

Abstract

Scholars have observed the gradual encroachment and eventual domination of Russian regional elections by the Kremlin’s ‘party of power’, Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia). This raises the question of what accounts for the excessive nationalization of the Russian vote? In this chapter we analyze this phenomenon systematically by studying elections for regional (sub”ekty) parliaments held between 2003 and 2015. We find strong evidence that electoral institutional engineering has strongly facilitated nationalization. However, despite an overall trend of nationalization, we also find significant traces of a regionalization of the vote. The depth and speed of nationalization have been unequal across the territory, but we find that nationalization has been particularly pronounced in ethnic regions―a finding that runs counter to international trends.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although we include them on this list, the Republic of Crimea and its capital city of Sevastopol remain unrecognized as Russian territory by the wider international community. We exclude them in the analyses presented below.

  2. 2.

    Some regions (such as Tatarstan, Chechnya and Bashkortostan) retained significant de facto autonomy even after formally cancelling their treaties. Bashkortostan incorporated the bilateral treaty into a revised constitution (Ross 2002, pp. 149–50) and Tatarstan signed a new one in 2007 (Chebankova 2009b, pp. 66–7).

  3. 3.

    We could not assign vote share won by candidates to party labels for the majoritarian tier results for the 2011–15 electoral cycle. The results for the 1999, 2003 and 2007 elections have been assigned to parties by IRENA (Geliks Center hosted at http://irena.org.ru/index.html, accessed 14 November 2015). Unfortunately, the regional election database was taken offline by the federal election authority in 2012 (http://www.themoscownews.com/russia/20120224/189485434.html, accessed 14 November 2015). Therefore, we are not able to update the election data for the majoritarian electoral tier results for elections held after 2011 because the Central Electoral Commission and its regional affiliates (www.cikrf.ru) list majoritarian candidates only by name and not by party affiliation in the official results.

  4. 4.

    A party is included when it won at least 5 percent of the vote in a region for at least one federal or regional election (excluding independent candidates).

  5. 5.

    These six parties have won at least 5 percent of the vote in a region for at least one federal or regional election (excluding independent candidates).

  6. 6.

    These dimensions are open/closed political life, democratic elections, political pluralism, independence of the media, corruption, economic liberalization, civil society, political structure, elite turnover and local government (more information is provided by Petrov and Titkov 2004).

  7. 7.

    The substantive results for federal elections are as follows. In ethnic regions, the vote share for United Russia is 13 percent higher and the combined vote share for the five Duma parties is 12.7 percent lower. The most populous region has a 6 percent higher weight relative to the total Russian population, and this equals to 15 percent higher vote share for United Russia and to 10.8 lower vote share for the five Duma parties. The lowest democracy score is 17 and the highest score is 45 and the difference equals to 33.6 percent lower vote share for United Russia and to 24.6 percent higher vote share for the five Duma parties.

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  1. Faculty of Culture and Society (Kultur och Samhälle), Malmö University, SE-205 06, Malmö, Sweden

    Derek S. Hutcheson

  2. Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Arjan H. Schakel

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    Arjan H. Schakel

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Hutcheson, D.S., Schakel, A.H. (2017). Russia: Nationalization Achieved Through Electoral and Institutional Engineering. In: Schakel, A. (eds) Regional and National Elections in Eastern Europe. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51787-6_8

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