Cooptation is one of the most efficient strategies employed by authoritarian regimes and their leaders in order to survive in power. In most of these regimes, dominant pro-government parties serve as ...important tools of cooptation in general and of legislative recruitment, as one of its forms, in particular. The main thesis of this study is that cooptation is selective. When contrasted to the social sectors that are directly linked to the state, the private sector will be at a relative disadvantage, resulting in a smaller scope of cooptation. To test this thesis empirically, we build several hypotheses based on our expectations regarding the effects of electoral rules on candidate selection, and then test these hypotheses against the data from 82 regional legislative elections held in Russia in 2015–2020. The analysis confirms our main thesis and clarifies several findings previously reported in the literature on business and politics in Russia.
This study places Russia’s political regime into a comparative perspective by developing a conceptual framework that classifies authoritarian regimes along two dimensions, those of regime-specific ...institutionalization and electoral institutionalization. The resulting conceptual map places Russia’s political regime of 2003–2023 into the category of regimes that, while including an electoral component, score relatively low on the dimension of regime-specific institutionalization. At the same time, the conceptual map allows for tracing the regime’s evolution along the two dimensions. The analysis reveals that over time, the regime has undergone a staged transformation from electoral authoritarianism with relatively strong, albeit mostly informal, constraints on the exercise of executive power to a full-fledged personalist dictatorship. This process was finalized after the 2020 constitutional amendments, and became manifest in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022.
Is coordinated anti-regime voting by opposition-minded citizens possible in authoritarian settings where the opposition does not coalesce against the regime? If so, what are the factors behind the ...citizens' (un)willingness to vote strategically for the opposition? This study investigates the 'smart vote' (umnoe golosovanie) strategy of Aleksei Naval'nyi in the 2020 subnational elections in Russia and shows that it boosted non-regime candidates' electoral results countrywide. The article also finds that the willingness of anti-regime voters to behave strategically depends on the candidates' opposition credentials, and that this willingness can be affected by the scope of voter intimidation available to the authorities.
This article uses a unique dataset from the September 2019 municipal elections in St. Petersburg in order to examine empirically the efficacy of strategic voting under authoritarianism, as manifest ...in the effects of the "smart vote campaign" of Alexei Navalny in Russia. The analysis allows for the conclusion that the campaign, while technically similar to the vote advice applications that are now widespread in many democracies, was efficient enough to make a significant difference in the overtly authoritarian context. We demonstrate empirically that Navalny's call for strategic voting did indeed affect the behavior of the electorate, particularly by improving strategic coordination among opposition-minded voters; that the electoral results of the candidates backed by the "smart vote" campaign tended to be better than the electoral results of other non-United Russia candidates; and that as a result of the "smart vote" campaign, the dominant party's electoral results deteriorated quite visibly.
The existing measures of party system nationalization and territorial heterogeneity of electoral support, including the Gini-based system-level nationalization score and its complements, can be ...inappropriate in those research contexts where, as it is in the study of federations, the territorial structure of the state is a substantively important factor of political development rather than one of the possible levels of electoral data aggregation. This problem can be solved by using a normalized version of the Gini coefficient. Alternatively, it is possible to use a new measure, the index of party system nationalization proposed in this study. While both the normalized Gini-based index and the new measure fully satisfy all theory-inspired requirements and yield similar results, the new measure may be preferable because of its relative computational simplicity and intuitively easy understanding.
This article overviews and seeks to explain the processes of party system formation in the post-Soviet Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) by ...focusing on a crucial party-system property, fragmentation. The analysis reveals that to a much greater extent than in democracies, where party systems are largely shaped by societal factors, the level of party system fragmentation in autocracies is determined by the scope of presidential powers, as entrenched in the formal institutional order and reflected in the national constitution. The level of authoritarianism is largely inconsequential for party system fragmentation, while the role of electoral rules is secondary. Institutionally weak and institutionally strong autocratic presidents have a preference for fragmented party systems, while presidents with an intermediate range of powers seek and obtain low levels of party system fragmentation.
The Laakso—Taagepera index of the effective number of parties, while satisfying most of the requirements of this aggregate quantity, tends to produce unrealistically high scores for party ...constellations in which the shares of the largest parties exceed 50 percent, and can produce misleading results in several other situations. After reviewing the structural properties of the Laakso—Taagepera index and supplements or alternatives to it proposed in the literature, this article proposes a new index that eliminates several problems inherent in the mathematical form of indices using the Herfindahl—Hirschman measure of concentration as computational core. The proposed index is tested on a set of party constellations from recent elections in new democracies and non-democratic electoral regimes. The results confirm that the new index works better than earlier proposed alternatives in measuring the effective number of components in highly fragmented and highly concentrated party systems.
This article uses a representative sample of elections held in 80 countries (1992-2012) for a statistical analysis of societal and institutional factors of party system nationalization. The analysis ...demonstrates that high degrees of political decentralization, such as in federations and devolved states, exert a strong negative effect on party system nationalization. However, in the long-term federalism can accommodate highly nationalized party systems. Another factor that strongly contributes to party system nationalization is a high quality of democracy. The degrees to which different varieties of electoral rules support party system nationalization are associated with a lack of incentives for cultivating the personal vote. Countries with large populations and societies divided along linguistic and/or religious lines tend to have party systems that are less nationalized, but these factors are not as important as institutional determinants. The impact of some of the factors is mitigated by party system fragmentation.
This study uses empirical evidence from a nearly comprehensive set of electoral democracies that use single-member plurality systems or mixed electoral systems with single-member plurality components ...in order to establish empirically the impact of territorial patterns of electoral support upon vote-to-seat conversion. The analysis, employing individual parties as units of analysis and multiple linear regression with cluster-robust standard errors as its main methodological tool, confirms the hypothesis that single-member plurality rules give a representational bonus to parties with low levels of nationalization. This effect is contingent upon absolute and relative party size, so that very large parties, and particularly frontrunners in party competition, receive an advantage irrespective of their nationalization. Mixed electoral rules further facilitate their advantage, while the gains of very small parties tend to be enhanced by large assembly size. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of party system development under Duvergerian conditions.
