The Electoral Map of Contemporary Russia

Abstract

The Russian presidential election campaign that ended with the voting on 16 June and 3 July 1996, which brought victory to Boris Yeltsin, initiated a new stage in the electoral cycle that began in March 1991 with the referendum on preserving the Soviet Union and is associated with the "Yeltsin" period of Russian history. Its distinguishing feature was and is an electorate distributed between two poles, those who are and those who arc not loyal to thc proposed model for reforming society. This bipolarity was seen for the first time on a Russia-wide scale in the results of the March 1991 referendum and was reproduced in various forms until July 1996, since the tendencies that would lead to a more complex structure of the electorate were still very weak. A political geography approach reveals regional trends in the evolution of voters' behavior, and an examination of these trends provides a picture of the overall Russian electoral process.