Parliamentary Elections in Russia

Abstract

The focus of the book is on the seven rounds of parliamentary elections that have taken place in Russia since 1993. After the chaos that followed the collapse of the USSR, a new Russian political system has been forged in the early twenty-first century that has consolidated around high support levels for its president, Vladimir Putin. Russia’s legislature – the Federal Assembly, including the State Duma – forms an integral part of the machinery of governance. Successive changes to the electoral and party systems have moved the country from the chaos of early post-Soviet years toward a stable executive-dominated system propped up by a four-party ‘cartel’ – dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party – in the legislative sphere. A common perception has grown that Russian elections are predictable, controlled and pointless to examine in a comparative context. But real voters cast real ballots, and this book is the story of how the electoral system has evolved, how the campaigning strategies of the political parties have developed, and how the voting behaviour of Russians has changed across the first quarter-century of Russian independence. The most comprehensive long-term study to date of Russian elections, it utilises a combination of official data, new primary material and in-depth analysis to assess the electoral arena of the Russian Federation from the end of the Soviet Union to the start of Putin’s fourth term.