From Adygeya to Yaroslavl: Factors of Party Development in the Regions of Russia, 1995-1998

Abstract

It is generally recognised that political parties have failed to emerge as important actors in the vast majority of Russia's regions.' Party underdevelopment on the regional level has been testified by recent studies focused on candidate nomination strategies and electoral performance in the 1995 national legislative elections2 and in the 1995-97 gubernatorial elections.3 On the one hand, this situation can be explained with reference to a particularly unfavourable constellation of institutional and political factors in Russia as a whole.4 On the other hand, the modest role of parties in gubernatorial elections arguably stems from these elections' inherently majoritarian features.5 In this analysis I will attempt to identify factors facilitating party development on the regional level by focusing my attention on a presumably favourable institutional milieu of sub-national legislative elections. So far, this subject has not attracted much scholarly attention. In addition to a number of descriptive studies,6 the 1993-94 regional legislative elections generated two articles discussing primarily the occupational structures of the assemblies.7 In particular, it has been demonstrated that the electoral strength of administrative and economic managers impedes party development. Some of the studies of more recent elections confirm this inference.8 Taking different but still elite-centred perspectives, other analyses related regional party development in Russia to the 'split and reconfiguration of ex-Communist party factions'9 and to intra-elite conflicts on the regional level.'1 Both explanations have been based on fairly limited numbers of observations. In this analysis I will examine the results of regional legislative elections held in 86 regions of Russia in 1995-98. By regions I understand constitutionally defined sub-national units of the Russian Federation-republics, kraya, oblasti, federal cities, the autonomous oblast' and autonomous okruga (AO). First, I will identify the empirical indicators of party development on the regional level, thus constructing a set of dependent variables. At the same time, some basic factual information about the regional assembly elections and those political parties that are active on the regional level will be provided. Second, I will formulate and substantiate several hypotheses about the causes of party development. The operationalisation of these hypotheses will provide a set of independent variables. Third, I will statistically examine the strength of the hypothetical causal relationships. On this basis, a number of factors facilitating party development in Russia's regions will be identified.