Suchergebnisse

The September 2020 regional elections in Russia employed a new three-day voting scheme. This change, along with biased electoral rules, helped the Kremlin to maintain control over all gubernatorial offices, as well as - via United Russia - over all regional parliaments and a majority of city councils in regional capitals. At the same time, Alexei Navalny's "smart vote" initiative was effective in big cities. Multi-day voting will once again be used in the Duma elections next year, but there the Kremlin's landslide victory is in jeopardy due to United Russia's declining popularity among voters and the ability of the candidates backed by the "smart vote2 campaign to defeat UR nominees in a number of single-member districts.

Within the period of 1993–2014 Russia experienced four major electoral reforms: in 1993, 2002, 2005 and 2014. One further attempt to change the Russian electoral system, initiated by President Yeltsin in 1994–95, was unsuccessful. We suggest that the successes as well as the failures of the electoral reforms in Russia can be explained with the same reasons as in other countries regardless of their political regime. In our view, electoral reforms within any political system are rooted in the specific arrangement of the veto players within the system and their political preferences. This paper demonstrates that major electoral reforms were successfully implemented in cases when the executive branch headed by the Russian president, striving for maximum control over the legislative process, was interested in such implementation and there were no other veto players able to block passage of the law.

One of the well-known properties of multimember plurality systems is their propensity toward producing the so-called "sweep effect," manifesting itself in that the strongest party in a majority of districts sees its full slate of candidates elected even if the margin of plurality is small. Despite this property, and mostly for technical reasons, this system remains rather widely employed for conducting local elections both in democracies and in electoral authoritarian regimes. This article employs the evidence from the 2019 municipal elections in St. Petersburg to examine how increased strategic coordination of opposition voters became instrumental in countering the sweep effect and thus reducing the scope of political monopoly in an overtly authoritarian context. The analysis shows that this goal was achieved primarily by enabling opposition-minded voters to cast a greater number of votes than it otherwise would have been.