Signaling and Information Acquisition in Authoritarian Institutions: Theory and Evidence from Russian Parliamentary Elections

Abstract

What role do elections play in non-democracies? We propose a statistical test that can distinguish between two major theories of authoritarian elections: that elections can be used to maintain an image of invincibility of the regime (Signaling Theory), or that elections can be used to get information about the popularity of the regime (Information Acquisition Theory). While those theories might not be mutually exclusive, we show formally that they generate different prediction about the spatial allocation of electoral manipulation. Under Signaling Theory, electoral manipulation happens in the areas where the regime is not popular. Under Information Acquisition theory, electoral manipulation should happen only in the places where the regime is popular. Using the data from 2007 and 2011 Parliamentary elections in Russia, we find that electoral manipulation was more likely to happen in the regions where the level of support for the regime is lower. Decrease in one standard deviation of regime popularity is associated with the increase in the estimates of electoral manipulation by 0.2 standard deviation, thus corroborating Signaling Theory. Our estimations are robust to an array of proxies for electoral manipulation. We also confirm that the results are unlikely to be spurious using instrumental variables and placebo tests.