Who delivers the votes? Elected versus appointed local executives, election manipulation, and natural support for ruling parties

Abstract

Theories of authoritarian politics hold that multiparty elections provide a variety of benefits for regime survival. In the local context specifically, the introduction of local elections in otherwise closed regimes has been shown to generate improvements in government legitimacy and performance. Yet some non-democratic governments do not hold local executive elections, in the hopes of increasing control over local political resources. Drawing on these theories, this paper proposes that appointed local executives will produce more election manipulation for national parties, but that this comes at a cost to the party's un-manipulated support. Drawing on election-forensic analysis of precinct-level election data from 175 Russian cities over six national elections from 2003 to 2012, these hypotheses are supported using marginal structural models to account for selection bias and confounding.