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Voter Alignments in a Dominant Party System: the Cleavage Structures of the Russian Federation

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Voter Alignments in a Dominant Party System: the Cleavage Structures of the Russian Federation Voter alignments in a dominant party system: The cleavage structures of the Russian Federation. Master’s Thesis Department of Comparative Politics November 2015 Ivanna Petrova Abstract This thesis investigates whether there is a social cleavage structure across the Russian regions and whether this structure is mirrored in the electoral vote shares for Putin and his party United Russia on one hand, versus the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its leader Gennady Zyuganov on the other. In addition to mapping different economic, demographic and cultural factors affecting regional vote shares, this thesis attempts to determine whether there is a party system based on social cleavages in Russia. In addition, as the Russian context is heavily influenced by the president, this thesis investigates whether the same cleavages can explain the distribution of vote shares during the presidential elections. Unemployment, pensioners, printed newspapers and ethnicity create opposing effects during parliamentary elections, while distance to Moscow, income, pensioners, life expectancy, printed newspapers and ethnicity created opposing effects during the presidential elections. The first finding of this thesis is not only that the Russian party system is rooted in social cleavages, but that it appears to be based on the traditional “left-right” cleavage that characterizes all Western industrialized countries. In addition, despite the fact that Putin pulls voters from all segments of the society, the pattern found for the party system persists during presidential elections. The concluding finding shows that the main political cleavage in today’s Russia is between the left represented by the communists and the right represented by the incumbents. The data used to answer the research question is comprised of regional electoral results and statistics. The methodological approach accounts for the unique nature of the data, with a random effects model specified to control for endogeneity bias as well as to let the effect of each variable vary both within and between regions. The findings significantly contribute to future studies of Russia in general, but also to research fields studying party systems and political cleavages, elections under authoritarian rule, electoral systems and the relationship between parties and presidents in a semi-presidential system. Acknowledgements First, I would like to extend my gratitude to my professor and supervisor Michael Alvarez, who has guided me throughout the duration of my degree and throughout the production of this thesis. Specifically, I want to thank you for your support and enthusiasm during the challenging times of data collection and your extensive knowledge of the methodological approaches in the social sciences. The sophistication of the method applied in this thesis would not be same without your patience and guidance. Second, I want to thank my mentor, Pål Bakka, whose extensive knowledge about the world in general and Russia in particular, gave me indispensable insights about major patterns of my own research. Your genuine desire to help students to not only succeed, but expand their knowledge, has greatly enriched the theoretical and analytical parts of this thesis. Last but not least, I want to thank my supporting family and loving friends, whose belief that I could complete this, pushed me beyond my own limits and led to the creation of this thesis. Bergen, November 20th, 2015. Ivanna Petrova. Table of Contents i. Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Russia as a case ................................................................................................................. 6 1.1 Russia’s modern developments – From Yeltsin to Putin ................................................................ 6 1.2 Russia as a regime type: Electoral Authoritarianism ...................................................................... 7 1.3 The “Putin Effect” ........................................................................................................................... 8 1.4 The role of the “party of power” - United Russia ......................................................................... 10 1.5 The importance of electoral manipulation ................................................................................... 12 1.6 Where is the democratic opposition? – A hidden middle class .................................................... 15 1.7 Public opinion and perceptions of democracy ............................................................................. 17 Chapter 2: Cleavages and the Russian case ...................................................................................... 19 2.1 Cleavage theory ............................................................................................................................ 19 2.2 Stein Rokkan’s methodology ........................................................................................................ 21 2.3 Limitations of the traditional cleavage theory when applied to Russia ....................................... 23 Chapter 3: Russia’s Institutions and the Role of the Presidency ....................................................... 24 3.1 Institutional Factors ...................................................................................................................... 24 3.2 Presidential candidates ................................................................................................................ 29 Chapter 4: Russian party system ............................................................................................................ 35 4.1 Russian Parties .............................................................................................................................. 37 4.2 Selection of parties ....................................................................................................................... 38 Chapter 5: Searching for Russia’s cleavage structure ....................................................................... 48 5.1 Identifying voter preferences ....................................................................................................... 48 5.2 Rokkan’s cleavages ....................................................................................................................... 49 5.3 Economic cleavages ...................................................................................................................... 51 5.4 Demographic Cleavages ............................................................................................................... 52 5.5 Cultural cleavages ......................................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 6: Data ................................................................................................................................. 55 6.1 The dataset ................................................................................................................................... 55 6.2 Regions as units of analysis .......................................................................................................... 56 6.3 Dependent variables .................................................................................................................... 56 6.4 Independent variables - Initial dataset ......................................................................................... 57 6.5 Considerations towards the final dataset ..................................................................................... 58 6.6 The final dataset ........................................................................................................................... 62 Chapter 7: Hypotheses ...................................................................................................................... 63 7.1 Center-periphery: Distance to Moscow ....................................................................................... 64 7.2 Religion – Orthodox ...................................................................................................................... 64 7.3 Urbanity ........................................................................................................................................ 65 7.4 Industrial laborers ........................................................................................................................ 65 7.5 Gross regional product ................................................................................................................. 66 7.6 Income .......................................................................................................................................... 67 7.7 Unemployment ............................................................................................................................. 68 7.8 Pensioners .................................................................................................................................... 68 7.9 Ethnic Russian ............................................................................................................................... 69 7.10 Life expectancy ........................................................................................................................... 69 7.11 Higher
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