Disproportionality by proportional design: Seats and votes in Russia's regional legislative elections, December 2003 - March 2005

Europe - Asia Studies

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 25-55

  Golosov, Grigorii V ^a  

^a EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY AT ST PETERSBURG   (Russian Federation)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ELECTION; REGIONAL POLITICS; VOTING BEHAVIOR;

EURASIA; RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 31344444099     PISSN: 09668136     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09668130500401657     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. See Grigorii V. Golosov (2004) Political Parties in the Regions of Russia: Democracy Unclaimed (Boulder, Lynne Rienner), pp. 260 - 268.
2. The sources, in alphabetical order of regions, are: Altai krai, http://www.altai_terr.izbirkom.ru
3. Amur oblast', http://www.amur.izbirkom.ru
4. Arkhangelsk oblast', http://www.arkhangelsk.izbirkom.ru
5. Bryansk oblast', http://www.bryansk.izbirkom.ru
6. Chita oblast', http://www.chita.izbirkom.ru
7. Ingushetia, http://www.ingush.izbirkom.ru
8. Irkutsk oblast', http://www.irkutsk.izbirkom.ru
9. Kabardino-Balkaria, http://www.kabardin-balkar.izbirkom.ru
10. Kalmykia, http://www.kalmyk.izbirkom.ru
11. Kaluga oblast', http://www.kaluga.izbirkom.ru
12. Karachaevo-Cherkessia, http://www.karachaev-cherkess.izbirkom.ru
13. Khakasia, http://www.khakas.izbirkom.ru
14. Koryak autonomous district, http://www.koryak.izbirkom.ru
15. Kurgan oblast', http://www.kurgan.izbirkom.ru
16. Marii El, http://www.mari-el.izbirkom.ru
17. Mordovia, http://www.mordov.izbirkom.ru
18. Nenets autonomous district, http://www.nenetsk.izbirkom.ru
19. Ryazan oblast', http://www.ryazan.izbirkom.ru
20. Sakhalin oblast', http://www.sakhalin.izbirkom.ru
21. Sverdlovsk oblast', http://www.ikso.org
22. Taimyr autonomous district, http://www.taimyr.izbirkom.ru
23. Tatarstan, http://www.tatarstan.izbirkom.ru
24. Tula oblast', http://www.tula.izbirkom.ru
25. Ulyanovsk oblast', http://www.ulyanovsk.izbirkom.ru
26. Ust-Ordynskoe Buryat autonomous district, http://www.ust-ordynsk.izbirkom.ru
27. Vladimir oblast', http://www.vladimir.izbirkom.ru
28. Volgograd oblast', http://www.volgograd.izbirkom.ru
29. Vologda oblast', Krasnyi Sever, 12 December 2003;
30. Voronezh oblast', http://www.voronezh.izbirkom.ru
31. Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, http://www.yamal-nenetsk.izbirkom.ru
32. Yaroslavl' oblast', http://www.yaroslavl.izbirkom.ru.
33. The addresses of these sites are http://www.cikrf.ru and http://www.izbirkom.ru.
34. Central Electoral Commission of Russia (2004) Vybory deputatov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy Federal'nogo Sobraniya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2003: Elektoral'naya statistika (Moscow, Ves' Mir).
35. Internet publication: http://www.perepis2002.ru.
36. Grigorii V. Golosov (2003) 'Electoral Systems and Party Formation in Russia: A Cross-regional Alysis', Comparative Political Studies, 36, 8, October, pp. 912 - 935.
37. Douglas W. Rae (1967) The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven, Yale University Press).
38. In a comparative perspective, all Russia's regional electoral systems are 'mixed-superposition' or 'mixed-member majoritarian' systems in the sense that the PR tier does not compensate for any disproportionalities that stem from seat allocation in the district tier. See Louis Massicotte & André Blais (1999) 'Mixed Electoral Systems: A Conceptual and Empirical Survey', Electoral Studies, 18, 3, September, pp. 344 - 366;
39. Matthew S. Shugart & Martin P. Wattenberg (2001) 'Mixed-member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds?', in Matthew S. Shugart & Martin P. Wattenberg (eds) Mixed-member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 9 - 24.
40. John Loosemore & Victor J. Hanby (1971) 'The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion: Some Analytic Expressions for Electoral Systems', British Journal of Political Science, 1, 4, October, pp. 467 - 477.
41. The simple quota is defined as the total number of valid votes cast divided by district magnitude. Parties are given as many seats as they have won quotas, and the remaining seats are given to the parties with the largest remainders of votes. The only region that used a different seat allocation formula, Kalmykia, opted for a system of divisors known as d'Hondt. This system tends to be slightly less permissive towards small parties. However, it so happened that in its specific application in Kalmykia, d'Hondt produced the results that were absolutely identical to those that would have been produced by the simple quota and largest remainders.
42. Arend Lijphart (1990) Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945 - 1990 (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 26.
43. An additional element of variation among Russia's regional electoral system was that while the majority of the regions used closed party lists, three of them, Kalmykia and Koryak and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous districts, employed open party lists. In contrast to the closed ones, open lists allow for voting not only for parties but also for individual candidates.
44. Gary W. Cox (1991) 'SNTV and d'Hondt are "Equivalent"', Electoral Studies, 10, 2, June, pp. 118 - 132.
45. Markku Laakso & Rein Taagepera (1979) 'Effective Number of Parties: AMeasure with Application to Western Europe', Comparative Political Studies, 12, 1, April, pp. 3 - 27.
46. For a recent overview of measures of party system fragmentation, see Patrick Dunleavy & Françoise Boucek (2003) 'Constructing the Number of Parties', Party Politics, 9, 3, May, pp. 291 - 315.
47. Rein Taagepera & Matthew S. Shugart (1989) Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Yale University Press), pp. 82 - 83.
48. A detailed discussion of electoral co-ordination in mixed electoral systems is far beyond the scope of this inquiry. For empirical evidence from national elections in two post-communist countries, including Russia, see Erik S. Herron (2002) 'Mixed Electoral Systems and Party Strategies: Responses to Incentives by Ukraine's Rukh and Russia's Yabloko', Party Politics, 8, 6, November, pp. 719 - 733.
49. For a wide cross-national perspective, see Federico Ferrara & Eric S. Herron (2005) 'Going It Alone? Strategic Entry under Mixed Electoral Rules', American Journal of Political Science, 49, 1, January, pp. 16 - 31.
50. A clarification regarding certain peculiarities of electoral results in those regions that used the system of multimember plurality is in order at this stage. In these systems, electoral results, if expressed in percentages of voters, always add up to more than 100% because each of the voters has several votes. When calculating the values of ENP, I discarded this problem by using the shares of the vote cast for individual candidates. In principle, the same would have sufficed for calculating averages, but there is one complication stemming from a peculiarity of Russia's electoral systems that is to be discussed at length further in this analysis, the legal provision to cast a valid vote against all parties or candidates. Irrespective of district magnitude, one vote can be cast in this way. Since the numbers of votes 'against all' in regional elections tend to be substantial, the aggregation of electoral results on the basis of votes artificially overstates the shares of the vote received by individual candidates. My solution for this problem can be illustrated thus. Consider a hypothetical two-member district with three candidates and 60 voters, of whom 20 cast both their votes for candidate A, 15 for candidate B, five for candidate C, and 20 vote against all. The resulting distribution of percentage shares of the vote is 40:30:10:20, which is obviously unrealistic. Then it is necessary to recalculate the results. First, I establish the share of the vote 'against all' using the number of voters as a base, which yields 33.33%. Then I allocate the remainder of 66.67% to the three candidates according to their vote shares, so that the strongest receives 33.33%, the second-runner 25.00%, and the weakest 8.33%. Such recalculated percentage shares were used for all analytical purposes in this study.
51. Pippa Norris & Karlheinz Reif (1997) 'Second-Order Elections', European Journal of Political Research, 31, 1/2, February, pp. 109 - 124.
52. See, for instance, Michael McFaul & Nikolai Petrov (1997) Politicheskii Al'manakh Rossii 1997 (Moscow, Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi).
53. See Robert A. Dahl (1957) A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press);
54. David P. Quintal (1970) 'The Theory of Electoral Systems', Western Political Quarterly, 73, 4, December, pp. 752 - 761.
55. It should be noted that the patterns of relatively successful performance of the APR and very poor performance of the LDPR are traditional in Russia's regional legislative elections. See Grigorii V. Golosov (2003) 'The Vicious Circle of Party Underdevelopment in Russia: The Regional Connection', International Political Science Review, 24, 4, October, pp. 427 - 444.
56. Loosemore & Hanby, 'The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion'.
57. Michael Gallagher (1991) 'Proportionality, Disproportionality and Electoral Systems', Electoral Studies, 10, 1, March, pp. 33 - 51.
58. Rein Taagepera & Bernard Grofman (2003), 'Mapping the Indices of Seats - Votes Disproportionality and Inter-election Volatility', Party Politics, 9, 6, November, pp. 659 - 677.
59. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, p. 61.
60. Some of the regions retained such a ballot structure up to 1995. See John Löwenhardt & Ruben Verheul (2000) 'The Village Votes: The December 1999 Elections in Tatarstan's Pestretsy District', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16, 3, September, pp. 113 - 122.
61. For an interesting overview of the history of this unusual institution in Russia, see Hans Oversloot, Joop van Holsteyn & Ger P. van den Berg (2002) 'Against All: Exploring the Vote "Against All" in the Russian Federation's Electoral System', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18, 1, March, pp. 31 - 50.
62. For a related discussion of a highly disproportional distribution of seats in the 1995 national Duma elections, see Robert G. Moser (2001) Unexpected Outcomes: Electoral Systems, Political Parties, and Representation in Russia (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press).
63. Being highly proportional, the simple quota/largest remainders formula still allows for minor discrepancies mechanically stemming from any possible procedure of converting large numbers of votes into small amounts of seats.
64. The electoral laws of Russia's regions normally provide for several other possibilities of invalidating district elections. Two of these possibilities, insufficient voter turnout and the lack of competition resulting from candidate withdrawal, occasionally materialised, but much more rarely than the 'against all' vote.
65. When assessing the levels of disproportionality reported for Yamalo-Nenets and Nenets autonomous districts, it is important to take into account the fact that the multi-member tier in the latter region is excluded because it returned no deputies due to massive voting against all. Almost the same happened in Yamalo-Nenets district where only one of three aboriginal seats was filled. The level of disproportionality in this multi-member district is not reported separately, but it inters the calculation of weighted disproportionality. In the further statistical analysis, the results of multimember plurality elections in the autonomous districts are not taken into account.
66. Arend Lijphart (1986) 'Degrees of Proportionality of Proportional Representation Formulas', in Bernard Grofman & Arend Lijphart (eds), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (New York, Agathon Press), pp. 170 - 179.
67. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, pp. 160 - 162.
68. It must be noted in the presence of large amounts of wasted votes, minor discrepancies between individual parties' seat and vote shares that normally account for disproportionality in PR systems become less pronounced. Thus the relative impacts of the wasted votes and lost votes should be estimated with caution. If there were no legal provision for wasting votes on a massive scale, the shares of the lost votes would have increased to a certain extent mechanically. The overall levels of PR tier disproportionality are, however, fully comparable with those reported in comparative politics literature.
69. Since disproportionality (D) is a percentage measure, it stood to reason to assess the models' sensitivity to truncation. For this end, I employed tobit analysis, which produced results quite consistent with those reported.
70. Taagepera & Shugart, Seats and Votes, p. 253.
71. For a contrasting case, see Mark P. Jones (1993) 'The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws in Latin America and the Caribbean', Electoral Studies, 12, 1, March, pp. 59 - 75.
72. George Tsebelis (1990) Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Political Science (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).
73. When constructing the ABSENT variable, I had to confront the fact that the compositions of the electoral blocs that contested national and regional elections were often different. When dealing with this problem, I considered the participation of any of a national bloc's cofounders in regional elections as grounds for not including its share of the vote into the ABSENT category.
74. See Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarfeld & William McPhee (1954) Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
75. Quite in correspondence with this line of reasoning, a recent study of voting against all in Russia suggests that those who display this behavioural pattern remain politically interested and engaged. See Derek S. Hutcheson (2004) 'Disengaged or Disenchanted? The Vote "Against All" in Post-communist Russia', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 20, 1, March, pp. 98 - 121.
76. Arend Lijphart, Rafael López Pintor & Yasunori Sone (1986) 'The Limited Vote and the Single Nontransferable Vote: Lessons from the Japanese and Spanish Examples', in Grofman & Lijphart (eds), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, pp. 154 - 169.
77. Leon H. Weaver (1984) 'Semi-proportional and Proportional Representation Systems in the United States', in Arend Lijphart & Bernard Grofman (eds), Choosing an Electoral System: Issues and Alternatives (New York, Praeger), pp. 191 - 206.
78. For some cross-national evidence, see Andrew Reynolds & Ben Reilly (1997) The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design (Stockholm, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance).
79. Harley Balzer (2003) 'Managed Pluralism: Vladimir Putin's Emerging Regime', Post-Soviet Affairs, 19, 3, July, pp. 189 - 227;
80. Timothy J. Colton & Michael McFaul (2003) Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (New York, Brookings Institution Press).
81. William H. Riker (1986) The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven, Yale University Press).
82. Kommersant - Rostov-na-Donu (2004) 13 January.
83. Vremya i den'gi (Kazan') (2004) 18 March.
84. Golosov, Political Parties in the Regions of Russia, pp. 91 - 101.
85. Vladimir Gel'man & Grigorii V. Golosov (1998) 'Regional Party System Formation in Russia: The Deviant Case of Sverdlovsk Oblast", Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 14, 1/2, March/June, pp. 31 - 53.
86. Oblastnaya gazeta (Ekaterinburg) (2004), 5 February.
87. For an insightful analysis, see Aleksandr Kynev, 'Vybory zakonodatel'nykh sobranii v rossiiskikh regionakh 14 marta 2004 g.', Internet source: http://www.indem.ru/idd2000/anal/Kinev4421.htm.
88. Svobodnyi Sakhalin (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk) (2004), 29 September.
89. See Valentin Mikhailov (2000) 'Demokratizatsiya Rossii: Razlichnaya skorost' v regionakh', in V. Mikhailov, V. Bazhanov & M. Farukshin (eds), Osobaya zona: Vybory v Tatarstane (Ul'yanovsk, Kazanskoe otselenie mezhdunarodnoi pravozashchitnoi assotsiatsii), pp. 25 - 85. Of course, in different contexts the 'administrative resource' may be employed for different ends - for instance, not to increase turnout but to decrease it, as happened in the 1993 national legislative elections in Tatarstan.
90. See Cameron Ross (ed.) (2002) Regional Politics in Russia (Manchester, Manchester University Press), 2002;
91. Golosov, Political Parties in the Regions of Russia, pp. 161 - 175.