Ethnic groups’ spatial localization as a voting factor in national republics of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Although «national republics» are identified as a special category of RF units, they demonstrate very high variability of voting in federal elections. In this case, the voting that is loyal to the ruling party is connected not with the «republican status» as it is, but with the ethnic structure of the population in the republics because «ethnic networks» are an important resource used by political machines for electoral mobilization. At the same time, «ethnic networks» are not just high proportion of representatives of an ethnic group in the territory population. An important factor influencing the formation of «ethnic networks» is the format of the spatial localization of ethnic groups. When members of an ethnic group are«segregated», i.e., live separately from members of other ethnic groups, they have a much better chance of sufficiently close social ties and intensive ethnic identities, which can become an instrument of electoral mobilization. This hypothesis has been tested on the empirical data of the State Duma elections in 2007, 2011 and 2016 in national republics. The analysis confirmed that segregation as a special format of spatial localization has a significant influence on the effect of the impact of the titular group proportion in the population of national republics on voting for United Russia.