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"After the gradual slowing down of the "third wave of democratization," electoral authoritarianism is rapidly emerging as a dominant form of contemporary autocracy. Political parties play a key role within the political and institutional structures of electoral autocracies. Pro-regime parties provide the dictatorial executive with electoral and legislative tools of sustaining power. At the same time, permitted opposition parties, while normally incapable of challenging the regime, are important for regime sustainability because they perform such vital functions as co-opting actual or potential opposition groups, facilitating power-sharing, and mobilizing electoral participation. The interactions among the dominant parties and the permitted opposition parties, if displaying sustainable cross-temporal patterns, constitute authoritarian party systems. Authoritarian Party Systems provides a theoretical discussion of electoral authoritarianism with special reference to authoritarian party systems; a methodological overview of party system research with special reference to the problems caused by the authoritarian nature of the observed party systems; a comprehensive cross-regional and historical overview of authoritarian party systems; a quantitative analysis of their structural characteristics, including fragmentation, party system format, volatility, and nationalization; and in-depth discussions of the political regime determinants of authoritarian party systems and of the interplay between party systems and other components of the authoritarian institutional order. Quantitative analysis has been performed on an original database comprising cases of party-structured authoritarian regimes between 1945-2019. This content of the book is illustrated by case studies drawn from across the spectrum of contemporary authoritarian regimes"--

Political parties typically are assumed to be essential for contemporary democratic government and governance. Why, then, has the regime change in Russia failed to produce viable political parties? Grigorii Golosov addresses this question, exploring issues central to an understanding of Russian political development. Golosov combines statistical and qualitative analysis, including case studies, to explain why political parties have not yet taken hold in Russia's regions. His argument is bolstered by a uniquely comprehensive database of regional elections held in the period 1993-April 2003. Moving from the late Soviet era to current efforts by the federal government to promote a viable party system at the regional level, his work is a pathbreaking contribution to both Russian studies and comparative politics

In the run-up to the September 2021 Duma elections, the Russian authorities employed a range of tools to increase the odds that United Russia, the main pro-government party, would retain its two-thirds majority in the Duma in a context of low public support. They sought to facilitate the administrative mobilization of loyal voters through electronic voting and multi-day elections while reducing incentives for opposition-minded voters to turn out by excluding Navalny, listing independent media as foreign agents, and cracking down on protests. These tools were apparently successful: as counting went on, the vote shares of United Russia and A Just Russia steadily increased, while the vote shares of other major parties declined. But the sweeping and unidirectional nature of this change prompted widespread speculation about fraud, which has hampered the authorities' search for electoral legitimacy.

While formally a federation that vests significant powers in the sub-national bodies of government and leaves it for its federal units and municipalities to decide who will govern them by conducting elections, the Russian Federation is effectively a centralized authoritarian state. This paper uses evidence from the September 2017 sub-national elections in Russia to examine the role of formal political institutions in sustaining the country's political regime. The analysis shows that the political domination of the pro-government party over the regional political assemblies is sustained by a complex combination of party regulations and electoral rules. In particular, gubernatorial elections are organized and conducted in a way that ensures the victories of the incumbent governors who are effectively appointed by the president of Russia.

Die ideologischen Positionen des politischen Regimes in Russland sind äußerst stark von Unbestimmtheit gekennzeichnet. In dem Personenkreis, der der politischen Führung Russlands nahesteht oder mit dieser kooperiert, sind zwar deutlicher ausgeprägte ideologische Ausrichtungen zu erkennen (Nationalismus und Wirtschaftsliberalismus), doch ist keine von beiden vorherrschend. Die russische Opposition braucht im Unterschied zur Regierung dringend ideologische Vehikel, um auf das Bewusstsein größerer Bevölkerungsteile einzuwirken. Die Effektivität solcher Instrumente bleibt jedoch recht gering, da die Art, in der liberale Haltungen in öffentlichen Auftritten der Opposition präsentiert werden, nicht ganz den Werten der breiten Bevölkerung entspricht. Darüber hinaus integriert die Ideologie der Opposition nur unzureichend Werte, die mit nationaler Identität und sozialer Gerechtigkeit verbunden werden und den Bürgern Russlands wichtig sind.