Political Consequences of the Post-Soviet Electoral Systems

Abstract

In september 1993, at a meeting with representatives of political parties and social movements shortly before the national elections to the Russian parliament, President Boris Yeltsin proposed the introduction of some changes in the electoral legislation that would favor political parties. Yeltsin welcomed enhancing the role of parties in his address, because he preferred “the communists and national-patriots to stand for elections rather than on the barricades.”1 The author of these words, who ordered tanks to fire upon the Russian parliament the next day, can justifiably be accused of hypocrisy. However, this project is not about the morality of politicians. My research explores relationships between electoral laws and institutionalization of the party system; the Russian president made an important claim that is directly relevant to this topic. Yeltsin referred to an electoral system as a determinative factor of the development of the political party system and regime stability in general. Does an electoral system really matter? The electoral results in a democratic country are nothing more than a statistical inventory of party and/or candidate preferences. Only when the votes have been translated into seats can the election lead to a distribution of power. Since the rules of translating votes cast by the electors into seats in the national legislature can be arranged differently depending on the electoral system, a selection of a particular formula might generate far-reaching outcomes. A growing body of literature on political consequences of electoral laws agrees that any decision about “the most easily manipulable feature of a political system” (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989, 4) may affect many important issues, including the process of political institutionalization and the nature of the party system.2