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Between 2011 and 2016, the Kremlin altered its strategy to maintain elite coherence and shore up social support. The papers presented in this volume argue that these changes in formal rules, informal practices, state policy, and ideational narratives constituted a second authoritarian turn since 2000. In comparison to the first regime shift in the mid-2000s this strategic change combined tactics designed redefine the Kremlin's core support and construct electoral majorities that could deliver victories in the 2016 national parliamentary election and the 2018 presidential election. While the outcome of the 2016 election suggests overwhelming regime success, these papers raise important questions about the long-term efficacies of these strategies, their unintended consequences, and the contradictions that are evident in social attitudes. In the context of the growing literature on contemporary autocracy, these papers present a strong case for increased focus on social attitudes and behaviors as well as the ideational and informal elements of the state's mechanisms to maintain regime stability.

Vladimir Putin remains central to regime stability in the Russian Federation. However, the role that Mr. Putin's personalist appeal—rooted in both charismatic and noncharismatic linkages—plays in maintaining regime support is undertheorized. I argue that personalism is a powerful political resource in electoral authoritarian regimes because it provides a positive logic for skeptical voters to support the leader. Personalist linkages obscure the role that electoral bias plays in shaping electoral outcomes, diminishing the impulse for mass postelection protest. When the effectiveness of personalism declines, discontented citizens are more likely to protest biased elections. This article shows that Mr. Putin's appeal as a sound steward of the economy declined by 2012 but that other sources of issue satisfaction continued to shape some respondents' trust in the president.

This paper explores the legacy of the For Fair Elections (ffe) protest movement in 2011–2012 for electoral competition in Russia. We argue that through strategic innovation, oppositions in authoritarian countries can challenge the autocratic state on multiple fronts by transferring resources from street protests to the electoral arena. Our empirical focus is on Alexei Navalny's campaign for Moscow mayor in late summer 2013. The successful mass mobilization in the movement enabled the campaign to implement a model of electoral innovation based on ideational frames, resources, and tactics drawn from the protest movement. Voter response was stronger than expected, demonstrating the persistence of voter opposition in the face of genuine electoral choice. Relying on press reports, blogs, campaign materials and interviews with activists, we investigate the campaign's strategy and show why it presented a particular challenge to the regime. Our conclusion underscores the state's advantage in countering elite opposition innovation, but also highlights how effective opposition innovation can lead to significant changes in strategies to maintain regime stability.

We argue that the move to free and fair elections is only the first step in a democratic transition. With this change, competition moves into the legislative arena, where interests are defined not in terms of support or opposition to the old regime, but over competing visions of what government should do. Thus, examining legislative behavior and legislative outcomes helps us to understand the long-term political and policy trajectory of democratic transitions. Building on game-theoretic analysis of majority-rule decision-making, our hypothesis is that, after controlling for factors such as seat share, party survival depends on party relevance—the organization's influence over legislative outcomes. Using legislative roll call data from Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, we show that relevance is a major influence on party survival, even after controlling for seat shares and other factors. The last section of the paper discusses the implications of these results for democracy assistance programs.

This paper compares two solution concepts for majority rule decision-making in multi-dimensional settings: the uncovered set and the strong point. Our goal is to determine which of these solution concepts is the appropriate generalization of the median voter theorem to more complex (and more realistic) multi-dimensional majority-rule settings. By making this comparison, we also contribute to the debate about the degree of sophisticated decision-making exhibited by experimental subjects and their real-world counterparts. Using data from eleven previously-published majority rule experiments and analytic techniques drawn from geography, our analysis confirms expectations that the uncovered set provides accurate predictions of majority-rule decision-making; and, moreover, that the strong point provides little added insight, either as a solution concept on its own, or as a predictor of where outcomes lie inside the uncovered set.