Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Front matter -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- Part I: Elections in Russia and the USSR: A Historical Overview -- 2 Elections in Russian and Early Soviet History -- 3 Reforming the Soviet Electoral System -- Part II: The 1993 Election Campaign -- 4 Overview of the Campaign -- Part ill: Influences and Trends of the 1993 Campaign -- 5 Media Coverage in the Elections -- 6 Parties and Voters in the Elections -- 7 Stabilization or Stagnation? A Regional Perspective -- Part IV: The Framework of a New Political Order -- 8 The Development of the Russian Party System: Did the Elections Change Anything? -- 9 The Presidency and Political Leadership in Post-Communist Russia -- 10 The Legacy of Leninist Enforced De-participation -- 11 Conclusion -- Appendix: Electoral Associations and their Programmes -- Index -- Back cover.

This volume offers a number of forensic indicators of election fraud applied to official election returns, and tests and illustrates their application in Russia and Ukraine. Included are the methodology's econometric details and theoretical assumptions. The applications to Russia include the analysis of all federal elections between 1996 and 2007 and, for Ukraine, between 2004 and 2007. Generally, we find that fraud has metastasized within the Russian polity during Putin's administration with upwards of 10 million or more suspect votes in both the 2004 and 2007 balloting, whereas in Ukraine, fraud has diminished considerably since the second round of its 2004 presidential election where between 1.5 and 3 million votes were falsified. The volume concludes with a consideration of data from the United States to illustrate the dangers of the application of our methods without due consideration of an election's substantive context and the characteristics of the data at hand

"In 2008, the worldwide financial crisis dealt a severe blow to the construction industry in Tomsk, a charming academic center in Russia dubbed the "Siberian Athens" for the numerous universities that call the city home.1 A crisis of liquidity forced banks to stop lending altogether to the industry, freezing almost two-thirds of construction projects dead in their tracks. Demand for apartments dropped by nearly 80% and dozens of firms teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. One construction manager become so desperate he started spreading false rumors to customers that his competitors had already closed up their shops. Out of the half million total residents in Tomsk, some 30,000 construction workers risked losing their jobs.2"--

In this volume, which was originally published in 2003, a distinguished collection of specialists analyzes the critical elections that ushered out the Boris Yeltsin era in Russia and ushered in the leadership of Vladimir Putin. These parliamentary and presidential elections were critical for the future of Russia and are highly enlightening to scholars and students of electoral politics, party development and democratization. Collectively, the expertise represented by these authors extends to all the important facets of electoral politics and party development in Russia

In a path-breaking study of Russian elections, Regina Smyth reveals how much electoral competition matters to the Putin regime and how competition leaves Russia more vulnerable to opposition challenges than is perceived in the West. Using original data and analysis, Smyth demonstrates how even weak political opposition can force autocratic incumbents to rethink strategy and find compromises in order to win elections. Smyth challenges conventional notions about Putin's regime, highlighting the vast resources the Kremlin expends to maintain a permanent campaign to construct regime-friendly majorities. These tactics include disinformation as well as symbolic politics, social benefits, repression, and falsification. This book reveals the stresses and challenges of maintaining an electoral authoritarian regime and provides a roadmap to understand how seemingly stable authoritarian systems can fall quickly to popular challenges even when the opposition is weak. A must-read for understanding Russia's future and the role of elections in contemporary autocratic regimes.