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National autocratization and the survival of sub-national democracy: Evidence from Russia’s parliamentary elections of 2011

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Abstract

Sub-national political regimes play an important role in democratization. The article investigates the impact of the levels of sub-national democracy established in the 1990s through the early 2000s on the outcomes of national elections with a primary focus on the recent parliamentary elections in December 2011 in Russia. These elections came to play a very important role in the recent political history of Russia as a turning point, indicating whether democracy in the country was alive or dead. This article analyzes regional variations in voting in 2011. The article investigates the path-dependent nature of regional democracy in Russia in 2011 by using originally collected data from the regional electoral results. This article investigated whether the variety of regional political regimes that emerged and were established in the 1990s survived the centralization and regional institutional homogenization of the 2000s. We show that, despite of the centralization policy of Putin’s federal government, regions with different political regimes in the 1990s still behaved very differently in 2011. The analysis demonstrated that the institutional homogenization implemented by Putin’s government across the regions did not result in equally homogenous support for the central government across regions.

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Notes

  1. For example, control over regional legislation, fiscal transfers and appointment systems for local officials can serve as effective tools, on the one hand restricting the ability of a locality to make independent decisions and, on the other hand, incentivizing them to behave in a way consistent with the goals of the federation.

  2. The official titles of the heads of Russia’s different regions vary (governors, heads of republics, presidents). Throughout the article, ‘governor’ designates the head of a region, regardless of the respective title.

  3. On the role of elections in non-democratic systems in general (see Gandhi and Lust-Okar, 2009).

  4. For a treatment on ‘formal’ democratic institutions and the presence of electoral democracy in autocratic states (see, for example, Kubicek, 2010, Frye, 2010, Diamond and Morlino, 2005).

  5. See, for example, the excellent analysis of the limits of electoral democracy in Ukraine by Kubicek (2010).

  6. For example, in the case of Belarus, see Silitski (2005).

  7. For additional information on the varying level of democracy across post-Communist states, also see Bunce (2004), Frye (2010), Diamond and Morlino (2005).

  8. On the complex interconnection between (de-)centralization and democratization at the national and sub-national levels in Russia, see, for example, Stoner-Weiss (2006) and Obydenkova (2011b); on general problems of interrelation between decentralization and democratization, see Lane and Ersson (2005).

  9. Two components (corruption and economic liberalization) should be treated with caution, as they may represent not only the political but also the economic dimension of the Russian regional systems, yet their exclusion has no influence on the results.

  10. On the contrary, the effects can be caused by the federal government increasing the amount of attention it pays to the regions that have been more democratic in the past. It is possible that the federal government perceives the ‘learning effects’ described above as being very real leading to both the propaganda efforts and investments in asserting control over regional politics.

  11. This factor is another possible channel through which sub-national political regimes can affect nation-level politics in a non-democratic state. Possibly, the ‘learning effects’ of sub-national democracy described above are perceived as being very real by the federal administration, hence both the propaganda effort and the investments in asserting control over regional politics. Simpser (2008) suggests that in electoral autocracies, the government is usually interested in achieving overwhelming majorities in elections to signal its strength to the bureaucrats. This task is more important in regions with democratic histories; thus, the central government pays more attention to these jurisdictions.

  12. The institutional homogenization and substitution of elected regional executives for appointed ones by the central government was particularly intensive in the democratic regions; the more ‘resistant’ regions where sub-national regimes partially survived were mostly ethnic republics in the Caucasus and Volga regions (regional leaders in these regions were always extremely sensitive), where the regimes were generally initially less democratic (and certainly less democratic than the Russian federal political system in the 1990s).

  13. Schelder (2006, p. 3) defines electoral authoritarian systems as follows: these regimes hold regular elections, which are ‘broadly inclusive (they are held under universal suffrage) as well as minimally pluralistic (opposition parties are allowed to run), minimally competitive (opposition parties, while denied victory, are allowed to win votes and seats), and minimally open (opposition parties are not subject to massive repression, although they may experience repressive treatment in selective and intermittent ways). Overall, however, electoral contests are subject to state manipulation so severe, widespread, and systematic that they do not qualify as democratic. Authoritarian manipulation may come under many guises, all serving the purpose of containing the troubling uncertainty of electoral outcomes’.

  14. Obviously, the presence of appointed regional governors also impacts the election results, as one of their primary unofficial tasks was to provide the central government with the ‘right’ electoral outcomes and to secure the dominant position of Putin’s ‘party of power’ in the national parliament. However, based on existing differences in the levels of democracy across the regions, we still hypothesize that this factor may have had an impact by providing different results for both UR and the democratic opposition to this party.

  15. ‘Power vertical’ is a word of the Russian political slang describing the objective of centralization pursued by Putin.

  16. Furthermore, given the negligible role of sub-national parliaments, which have no impact on the sub-national executives – who are, as mentioned, appointed by the center – we can abstract from the problem of the coordination of electoral arenas, which could otherwise provide a serious challenge for our research. For discussion of this topic, see Lago and Montero (2009)

  17. The map also presents interesting implications for the geographic dimension and is in line with articles dedicated to the role of geography in terms of democracy promotion (see, for example, Kopstein and Reilly, 2000, Lankina and Getachew, 2006).

  18. All variables, if not stated otherwise, come from the Russian statistical agency Rosstat.

  19. ELF=1–∑si2, where si is a share of a particular ethnic group i in the population.

  20. Specifically, we do not find that voting for UR is affected by economic considerations – probably due to the lack of clear accountability in the Russian political system (see, Lago-Penas and Lago-Penas, 2010). We do find some impact of federal transfers, but it is not robust to changes in the specification.

  21. When we aggregated these two parties into a single sub-group ‘others’, the share of votes for this sub-group increased significantly as the level of democracy increased, both when we examined unconditional correlation and ceteris paribus other control variables. When we computed the group ‘others’ as the sum of votes for two small parties and invalid ballots, the results did not change. When we examined only invalid ballots (which could constitute a case of protest action by the electorate as well), we again found that this share was positively correlated with the democracy score, both unconditionally and ceteris paribus other covariates. However, we did not find any evidence of a non-linear effect of democracy (described in the next section) for any variable of this footnote.

  22. In some cases, we observed several substantial outliers (this was particularly true for Yabloko), but the findings are entirely robust to their exclusion.

  23. Specifically, significant results were obtained for political organization; pluralism of regional elites; freedom of elections; and, somewhat surprisingly, economic liberalization.

  24. If one estimates a system of equations using 3SLS, the results are entirely confirmed; we also find a non-linear, inverse, U-shaped effect of sub-national democracy on the support for JR.

  25. A somewhat similar conclusion was also made by Chebankova (2010), who stated that the centralization reforms did not dismantle existing sub-national democracy, and the regions could still be democratic even in highly centralized states.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to two anonymous referees of the journal for their helpful comments on the article. We have also gained some valuable feedback on sub-national politics in general from Michael Keating and on electoral process from the papers kindly provided by Ignacio Lago, and we are grateful to both of them for their support. We also would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Innovation and Science of Spain (Ramon y Cajal Programme), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27, Barcelona, 08005, Spain

    Anastassia Obydenkova

  2. East West Centre for Business Studies and Cultural Science, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Sonnemannstraße, Frankfurt am Main, 9–1160314, Germany

    Alexander Libman

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  1. Anastassia Obydenkova
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Correspondence to Anastassia Obydenkova.

Appendices

Appendix A

Table A1

Table A1 Electoral statistics
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Appendix B

Calculating the effective number of parties

In this article, we use two approaches to calculate the effective number of parties. First, with p being the share of votes received by each party in the election, the effective number of parties is given by

for i parties. The alternative formula we use is defined as

with p 1 being the share of votes received by the largest party (in our case UR).

Appendix C

Voting for individual opposition parties

Figure C1 and C2

Figure C1
figure 4

Parliamentary elections of 2011 and regional democracy of 2000–2004, linear fit.

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Figure C2
figure 5

Parliamentary elections of 2011 and regional democracy of 2000–2004, quadratic fit.

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Table C1

Table C1 Outcomes of parliamentary elections and regional democracy, linear effects of regional democracy (OLS)
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Table C2

Table C2 Outcomes of parliamentary elections and regional democracy, quadratic effects of regional democracy (OLS)
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Appendix D

Electoral outcomes of 2007–2008

Figure D1

Figure D1
figure 6

Elections of 2007–2008 and regional democracy of 2000–2004.

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Obydenkova, A., Libman, A. National autocratization and the survival of sub-national democracy: Evidence from Russia’s parliamentary elections of 2011. Acta Polit 48, 459–489 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.8

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