Parliamentary Elections in Russia: A Quarter-Century of Multiparty Politics by Derek S. Hutcheson (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 791 However, due to the prominence of the global history perspective, a more detailed engagement was needed with that historical trend. A more elaborate historiographical response — maybe in a concluding chapter — would have helped the reader situate the volume more accurately in the emerging scholarship on 1968. Trinity College Dublin Balázs Apor Hutcheson, Derek S. Parliamentary Elections in Russia: A Quarter-Century of Multiparty Politics. British Academy Monographs. The British Academy and Oxford University Press, London, Oxford and New York, 2018. xix + 326 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Table of laws and decrees. Index. £65.00. How have Russian State Duma elections varied between 1993 and 2016? In this book, Derek S. Hutcheson — a leading scholar on Russian elections — provides a meticulous analysis of the shifting electoral landscape in post-Soviet Russia. The book contains nine chapters. Following an introductory chapter and an overview chapter (that surveys the broad changes in electoral politics from the late Soviet period to the seventh State Duma election, including discussions of key actors in the party system and the shifting role of the State Duma), the third chapter discusses the Russian electoral system, including the frequent reforms to it. The fourth chapter then looks at the party system, charting the transition from the ‘floating’ party system of the 1990s to the ‘cartel’ party system emergent from the early- to mid-2000s. Chapter five examines how political marketing has evolved, as well as how media coverage of party campaigns has varied both by party and over time. The sixth chapter turns to voter mobilization, including discussions of the use of ‘administrative resources’, turnout patterns and motivations for (non-)voting. The seventh chapter looks in more detail at voting behaviour, including analysing voting variation across Russian regions and discussing party identification, as well as the reasons for electoral discontent. The final substantive chapter discusses the question of electoral legitimacy, evaluating both evidence of electoral subversion and perceptions of legitimacy in the eyes of both Russian voters and international observers. The key attractions of the book are its sustained diachronic analysis of the full set of State Duma elections; its discussion of discrete stages of elections, from electoral laws to behaviour at the ballot box; and the impressive level of detail provided. By giving a long-term view of federal-level legislative elections, Hutcheson underscores the point that the State Duma’s current status as ‘a SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 792 compliant part of the political “machine”’ (p. 5) is ‘not by chance’ (p. 3) — rather, a ‘considerable degree of institutional engineering […] has gone into creating’ this state of affairs (p. 5). In other words, ‘the constitutional structure of Russia does not necessarily lead to domination of the legislature by the president’ (p. 75). The text is peppered with fascinating details, including the reason why United Russia’s symbol is a bear (p. 30) and an account of farcically frequent party switching by one State Duma deputy (pp. 94–96). There are even some surprisingmomentsofhumour,suchasthedescriptionofthetimewhenformer Central Electoral Commission chairman Vladimir Churov landed in a pond in 2012 (p. 68), and the footnote on Ivan Rybkin’s mysterious disappearance during the 2004 presidential election campaign (p. 29). The use of the word ‘election’ in modern-day Russia is often modified by adjectives such as ‘fake’, ‘rigged’, ‘manipulated’ and ‘falsified’. One distinctive feature of Hutcheson’s analysis is that ‘it does not take as its starting point the automaticassumptionthattheRussianFederationisanunequivocally“electoral authoritarian” regime’ (p. 3). One advantage of taking this approach is that Hutcheson can do justice to the variation in the level of Kremlin control over elections in the post-Soviet period; there is not one simple characterization that can capture the federal executive’s stance towards, and fortunes in, State Duma elections. Another advantage is that, by adopting this starting point — that ‘real elections take place within the rules of the game’ (p. 56) — Hutcheson remains sensitive to the ways (beyond unfair manipulation of electoral procedures and illegal falsification) by which the authorities have been able to secure victories since 2003, such as through adopting modern political marketing techniques to appeal to as many voters as possible. The recipe for success in electoral authoritarian...