National autocratization and the survival of sub-national democracy: Evidence from Russia’s parliamentary elections of 2011

Abstract

Sub-national political regimes play an important role in democratization. The article investigates the impact of the levels of sub-national democracy established in the 1990s through the early 2000s on the outcomes of national elections with a primary focus on the recent parliamentary elections in December 2011 in Russia. These elections came to play a very important role in the recent political history of Russia as a turning point, indicating whether democracy in the country was alive or dead. This article analyzes regional variations in voting in 2011. The article investigates the path-dependent nature of regional democracy in Russia in 2011 by using originally collected data from the regional electoral results. This article investigated whether the variety of regional political regimes that emerged and were established in the 1990s survived the centralization and regional institutional homogenization of the 2000s. We show that, despite of the centralization policy of Putin’s federal government, regions with different political regimes in the 1990s still behaved very differently in 2011. The analysis demonstrated that the institutional homogenization implemented by Putin’s government across the regions did not result in equally homogenous support for the central government across regions.