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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.

Modern political campaigning is becoming increasingly professionalized to the extent that in Australia today the major parties use electoral databases to assist with their campaigns. The electoral databases of the Coalition (Feedback) & the Australian Labor Party (Electrac) store information on the constituents of each House of Representatives seat. The information gathered in the databases, such as the policy preferences & party identification of individual voters, are used by candidates for House seats to tailor correspondence to swinging voters, & to identify potential party supporters. Party organizations aggregate the information in the databases & use it to conduct polls & focus groups of swinging voters, & to tailor policy development & campaign strategies. Electoral databases have the potential to improve the level of communication between elected representatives & their constituents. There are, however, a number of ethical problems associated with their use. While the usefulness of the databases to the major political parties is undeniable, their use underlines the trend in modern campaigning towards targeting swinging voters at the expense of the majority of the electorate. Considerable public resources are devoted to the smooth operation of the databases. They would be much less effective were political parties not exempted from the Privacy Act. The use of personal information collected by members of parliament by political parties should be more closely regulated. Despite the wishes of the major political parties to keep their operation a secret, the advantages & disadvantages of the use of electoral databases should be more widely debated. 33 References. Adapted from the source document.

On the evening of 14 May 1989, hours after Argentina had held its first elections for a presidential succession in 60 years, the atmosphere at the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Unión del Centro Democrático(UCEDE) was lugubrious. The electoral news flowing into the computer terminals harbingered a resounding victoiy for Carlos Menem, the Peronist presidential candidate, and a remote third place showing of 6% for Alvaro Alsogaray, the presidential candidate of the young conservative party. Even in the capital city of Buenos Aires, where the UCEDE had led in the polls for congressional elections right up to election day, it trailed in third place. Would-be congressmen wandered the headquarters floor bewildered.

Democracy is inherently difficult in societies divided along deep ethnic cleavages. Elections in such societies will often encourage 'centrifugal' politics which reward extremist ethnic appeals, zero-sum political behaviour and ethnic conflict, and which consequently often lead to the breakdown of democracy. Reilly examines the potential of 'electoral engineering' as a mechanism of conflict management in divided societies. He focuses on the little-known experience of a number of divided societies which have used preferential, vote-pooling electoral systems - such as Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Fiji. Examination of these cases shows that electoral systems which encourage bargaining between rival political actors, which promote the development of broad-based, aggregative political parties and which present campaigning politicians with incentives to attract votes from a range of ethnic groups can, under certain conditions, encourage the development of moderate, accommodatory political competition in divided societies