Explaining Electoral Competition across Russia's Regions

Abstract

Russia can only be considered an electoral democracy to the extent that its constituent parts also fit this classification. In this article, Bryon J. Moraski and William M. Reisinger assess how well competing theories drawn from the literature on democratization explain the variation across Russia's regions in their progress toward competitive electoral politics. Their analysis reveals that distinctions among the regions in their social structure, arising from developments in the decades before 1991, help explain political competition in a manner unanticipated not only by existing literature on democratization but also by existing studies of Russian democracy at the national and individual levels. Moreover, they find that the divergent experiences of the regions during the 1990s—in their economies and levels of crime, for example—and variations in party development also help us discern which regions have moved furthest along the path toward electoral democracy.