The Party’s On: The Impact of Political Organizations in Russia’s Duma Elections

Henry E. Hale Harvard University October 1999

Do political parties matter in Russia? From one perspective, they clearly do. Half of the Russian parliament (the Duma) is elected on the basis of proportional representation (PR), according to which system only registered political movements can compete. Observers frequently charge, however, that political parties1 matter little outside the boundaries of the “all-federation district” in which the PR race takes place. These political organizations are said to be ephemeral, weak and rootless, shifting with the political winds and having little connection to the Russian electorate. At best, they are the political vehicles for specific individuals who have focused little energy on building strong organizations capable of surviving them, and who seek mainly to build up their own personal authority. Only the Communist Party, the argument goes, maintains a “real” political party, and this is only because of the rich institutional heritage bequeathed it by the predecessor organization that ruled the USSR for seven decades. Comparative political science, however, suggests strong reason to believe that political organizations may, in fact, be coming to play an important role in Russian elections since parties can provide candidates with an “instant reputation” and organizational support that are otherwise hard to obtain.

1 Here I use the term “party” very loosely to include all political organizations legally able to compete in elections for seats in Russia’s representative state organs of power.

1 2 The Party’s On

This paper tests these hypotheses on data from Russia’s first two multiparty elections since Communist rule, seeking to determine whether Russia’s myriad and multiplying political parties significantly affect the performance of candidates in the single-mandate district (SMD) elections for the State Duma. Analysis of the 1993 election appears to prove the pessimists right. Not only did parties fail to help their candidates, they actually had a negative impact in most cases. But the pessimists were not right for long. By 1995, results show, Russian political parties had come to have a statistically significant positive impact on the ballot totals garnered by pretenders to parliamentary power. Candidates with party affiliations got more votes than those without them. On the other hand, the magnitude of this effect was only moderate in size. Nevertheless, some parties proved to have a much stronger positive effect than others, and the Communist Party was not the only organization to be an important asset in a campaign in Russia. Adding confidence to the claim that parties played important roles in 1995 is the following result: there was a strong correlation between voting for parties in the PR race and voting for candidates nominated by these parties in the SMD competition. This suggests that most major Russian parties were not simply about the personalities of their leaders. but were developing a broader human and ideological base even as early as 1995. This result is consistent with survey data collected by Timothy Colton and William Zimmerman in 1995 and analyzed by Josh Tucker and Ted Brader, which also found moderate but significant party affinities forming amongst the voting population. Thus, while Russian political organizations do not display the levels of institutionalization characteristic of Western parties, they are found to be quite important in the often tightly contested territorial district Duma races where just a few percentage points can sometimes be the difference between a parliamentary seat and a forgotten fourth or fifth place.

The Question Should we expect political parties to matter in the single-mandate district races for parliamentary seats in Russia? Three main approaches to this question are evident. John Aldrich, in his important book Why Parties (1995: 50), argues that politicians have incentive to join parties for electoral purposes since they provide two distinct advantages in the competition for votes. First, party membership is a way for candidates to efficiently signal to the electorate what views they represent without having to wait years for the voters to come to feel that they know a candidate well enough to understand his or her system of values and political behavior patterns. This can be an important advantage in a race with many candidates, many of whom are new to politics, where voters do not have much time (and often not much will) to gather information on the competitors; parties reduce information costs. Second, party membership provides organizational support deriving from the activities of other Henry E. Hale 3 candidates and the party apparatus itself. Having joined a party, candidates also benefit from the campaigning efforts of their fellow members across Russia. This might be especially true in Russia with its two-part parliamentary elections, in which candidates affiliated with a party can also benefit from the campaign activity of that party in the PR competition, which will undoubtedly be followed by many potential supporters. Other observers argue that political organization has a different meaning in Russia due to its political history of domination by a single party, the Communist party. Thus the view is widespread in Russian political society that people do not want candidates to be affiliated with parties since their only image of what a Russian party is and does is the party of Stalin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. A politician should represent “all the people, not just a party,” one frequently hears. Indeed, Russian President Yeltsin himself has refused to associate himself with any political party during his tenure for precisely this reason, he says, having quit the Communist Party shortly after assuming Russia’s helm in 1990. If these widespread perceptions are true, the reputational effect that Aldrich points out is inevitably a negative one, leading us to expect that being nominated by a party will actually hurt candidate performance in elections. A third argument frequently encountered among commentators may concur that Russian parties may one day play the role ascribed to them by Aldrich, but holds that for now they are very weak and overly focused on the personalities of their leaders and do not have much effect outside of PR voting. Party leaders have not sought to develop strong organizations with solid regional branches and internal competition, preferring instead to invest their human and financial resources into building up teams that are personally loyal and focused on promoting the images and careers of the leaders themselves. Many explanations are given for this state of affairs. Some point to the legacy of nihilism left by post-Communist disillusionment; others point to Russian political cultures of distrust and personalized politics; while still others refer to electoral laws and structures that make “real” party-building an unprofitable way to invest political resources. There is a great deal of good work in the field of political party development and voting in Russia.2 Most of it has focused, not surprisingly, on the two most important players in the electoral game, examining the attitudes of voters and the strategies of politicians. The current paper looks at where these important players come together, the elections themselves, examining the role of parties in producing the actual

2 See, for example, academic work by Timothy Colton, Vladimir Gelman, Grigory Golosov, Jerry Hough, Michael McFaul, Robert Moser, Nikolai Petrov, Regina Smyth, Joshua Tucker, Richard Rose, and many others. 4 The Party’s On results of Russia’s SMD elections. This will provide new insight into why or whether politicians join parties and why or whether voters find them useful. In addition, with a few prominent exceptions, most current work on parties has trained most of its attention on the proportional representation voting in Russia. This is understandable from several perspectives. First, for researchers self-consciously studying parties, the PR race is where they are the most evident and most resemble what we expect to find. Even more importantly, data are readily available on the PR competition (including both election results and opinion poll data), while until 1996 it was hard to find the complete results (including the percentage of votes garnered by the losers) for the SMD races. In addition, the PR races were the most dramatic and had the most clear-cut results, while the SMD races tended to be very complex, including a wide range of characters, some of whom did not belong to parties and some of whom supported more than one. The present study seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of the “neglected half” of Russia’s parliament. The paper primarily seeks to test two hypotheses deriving from the competing arguments above. First, if parties do not have an impact on SMD candidate performance, we should expect to find no significant correlation between the percentage of votes garnered by a party- nominated candidate in the SMD race and the share of ballots garnered by this candidate’s party in the PR race in that same district. That is, if parties do not matter, there is little reason to expect a connection between these two spheres of voting. One might hypothesize that similarities in views might still link these spheres, although the numbers of candidates and parties espousing similar views within a single district in both the SMD and PR races is likely to weaken this effect taken by itself. What is important to remember, however, is that “view similarity” is one of the critical intermediary variables that makes party affiliation beneficial in the first place, since parties are said by theorists like Aldrich to be instrumental in large part because they efficiently communicate candidates’ views to the voters, letting them know whose views are similar and whose are not. Nevertheless, we must keep this possibility of an “omitted variable” in mind and conduct further tests such as the second one presented here. Second, if parties do not matter, we should expect to find no correlation between political party affiliation and SMD results. That is, all other things equal, candidates without party affiliation should perform just as well as candidates with party affiliation.

Methodology The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of political parties on the results of single-mandate-district voting in Russian’s State Duma elections. To do this I use data on all 1,519 candidates who competed for Henry E. Hale 5

SMD seats in Russia’s Duma in 1993,3 and all 2,628 candidates who ran in December 1995.4 As mentioned above, the SMD races are complicated and numerous (225 per election cycle, to be exact), rendering a comprehensive and systematic study of them very difficult. For one thing, it would be a herculean (if not impossible) effort to obtain all of the data on all of the candidates necessary to make a study fully satisfying, including political views, personal background information, campaign strategy, political history, prior reputation, and especially intangibles like charisma. Nevertheless, so long as we do not set ourselves the task of formulating a “complete equation” of all factors influencing the SMD results but instead seek only to test the importance of a single set of factors and only to get a rough idea of the magnitude of their effects, then it is possible to obtain meaningful results from the limited data that are available (King 1990: 190–191). One difficulty deserves special mention. As Robert Moser (1999) has correctly observed, not all SMD candidates who are supported by or who support a given party are actually nominated by that party. This occurs for a number of reasons. In some cases, as described above, candidates worry that party membership would limit their potential vote, while in other cases they are limited by law to being formally registered as being nominated by one organization, relegating any second or third supporting party to a less prominent role. Data on which parties “really” support which candidates and vice versa are extremely hard to come by, especially when one gets to the more minor candidates in a district field of 20. This paper, therefore, should be interpreted specifically as studying the impact of official party nomination on candidate performance in the SMD Duma races of 1993 and 1995, since these are the only data available. Since we are interested in party strength, surely this has something to do with the ability to get candidates formally to commit to the party in question. Patterns of vaguer party endorsement are left for a future study. To identify broad patterns in the data with which to test the claims cited above, I use the statistical method of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). The strength of this method lies in the unparalleled simplicity of interpreting the coefficients it generates and the well-known nature of its drawbacks, allowing for a sound understanding of the results. It does not make the most efficient use of the data, however, although our large data set means that we can tolerate some lack of efficiency and still hope to obtain the results that other methods would detect. This is especially true since we are only interested in testing the importance of a single set of factors and in getting a rough idea of the size of the effects; as noted before, I am not trying to construct a complete function with exactly

3 I am grateful to Michael McFaul, Timothy Colton, and Jerry Hough for making available this data. 4 Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, official publication of results, 1996. 6 The Party’s On specified coefficients that explains all variation (King 1990: 190–191). OLS should prove more than adequate for this purpose and will allow us to report the results the most lucidly.

Results and Analysis The results of the statistical analysis tend to contradict claims that Russian political parties are meaningless outside of the proportional representation voting, suggesting instead that party affiliation is strongly linked with candidate performance in the single-mandate districts and that several parties provide very significant electoral benefits to their nominees. The study also confirms, however, that this was not true in 1993 and that in both 1993 and 1995 some parties were more important than others. If parties did not matter, we would not expect party-nominated candidates to perform noticeably differently from non-party affiliated candidates in the territorial district voting. Table 1 reports the results of a regression that bears out these pessimistic expectations, showing that candidates formally nominated by a political organization in 1993 did not perform better than independent pretenders to office. More dramatically, not only did parties fail to help their candidates overall, but they actually hurt them on polling day. There is less than one tenth of a one percent chance that this result was produced at random. While the specific numbers generated below must be taken only as a suggestion of the size of the true coefficient and not as an accurate measurement, it appears that nomination by one of Russia’s 13 competing parties cost a candidate about three percent of votes cast in 1993.

Table 1: Effect of Party Affiliation on Candidate Performance, 1993 Number of observations = 1519 R-squared = 0.2684 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

Independent Variable Coefficient Standard Error t-Statistic Number of Rivals -1.848392 .080962 0.000 Party Nomination -3.236064 .5486896 0.000 Constant 31.41379 .7666654 0.000

This result makes sense for many reasons. Alongside the reasons given by the more “pessimistic” theorists discussed above, Russia’s party system was brand new in 1993 and competing electoral associations had very little time to create and market a brand name, not to mention build a strong organization. Yeltsin unexpectedly (and quite illegally) disbanded Henry E. Hale 7 the old parliament in late September 1993, giving would-be parties less than three months to organize and prepare for their first-ever multiparty elections under conditions of great legal-political uncertainty and voter confusion. Parties rushed to find candidates to nominate in the regions, and very often just accepted anyone who declared their support for the party or who was a friend of someone connected to the central party organization. Moreover, the party candidates did not have to spend the time collecting signatures in order to get on the ballot that independent candidates did. This fact could have been expected to lead to a weaker overall showing by party candidates, since the weakest independent candidates were weeded out during the process of signature collection while party candidates just had to get the nod from a slapdash grouping of people in Moscow, for the most part. This, combined with the widespread lingering suspicion that all parties were really out to exploit the population like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was enough to ensure a very weak performance by party-nominated candidates. All told, therefore, parties had simply not had the time in 1993 to benefit from the advantages of partisan organization and reaped only the potential disadvantages. If the party pessimists are right--if the reasons for weak party development are somehow embedded in Russian institutions or culture and were not just a result of 1993’s peculiar circumstances--we should find that little had changed by the time of the 1995 Duma elections. While we might not expect party candidates to fare worse than independents, we should at least find no evidence that parties were coming to have a positive impact on voter behavior. Analysis of the 1995 data, however, reveals that significant changes had taken place in Russian political life since 1993. Table 2 reports the results of a regression showing that candidates formally nominated by a political organization did in fact perform better than independent pretenders to office; there was more than a 98 percent chance that this relationship was not a random one. It must be noted, however, that the magnitude of the effect of party affiliation is estimated to be extremely small, so small as to be almost negligible for would-be candidates. By affiliating with a party, a candidate can count on gaining less than one percent (0.74 percent) more votes.

Table 2: Effect of Party Affiliation on Candidate Performance, 1995 Number of observations = 2628 R-squared = 0.1170 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

8 The Party’s On

Independent Variable Coefficient Standard Error t-Statistic Number of Rivals -.6507909 .0352259 0.000 Party Nomination .7376304 .3099743 0.017 Constant 16.04457 .5365618 0.000

Although this might at first seem to confirm the pessimists’ argument, one must bear in mind that Russia’s cast of political characters had changed dramatically since 1993—more specifically, it had greatly expanded. If only 13 parties competed in 1993, well over 40 nominated candidates for the Duma in1995. Moreover, many of these new “parties” were in fact small, poorly known “microparties” that could not have been (and were not) expected to have much of an impact on the elections. Some succeeded in registering only a few candidates. It therefore makes sense also to test a variable representing only those parties that had enough organizational and human power to get a significant number of their own members registered as candidates. I thus create a dummy variable that has a value of “1” if a candidate was nominated by one of those parties with enough muscle to get candidates registered in at least a quarter of Russia’s 225 territorial districts. This variable included ten parties: Our Home is Russia (NDR), Yabloko, Forward Russia!, Russia’s Democratic Choice (DVR), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), the bloc Communists for the USSR, the Ivan Rybkin bloc and the Agrarian Party of Russia (APR). The results of this regression are reported in Table 3:

Table 3: Effect of Big-Party Affiliation on Candidate Results, 1995 Number of observations = 2626 R-squared = 0.1488 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

Independent Variable Coefficient Standard Error t-Statistic Number of Rivals -.6154786 .0347721 0.000 Nomination by Big Party 3.404532 .3342964 .000 Constant 14.79455 .5203119 0.000

As can be seen, we have a great deal of confidence that candidates affiliated with big parties did better than candidates with no such affiliation in Russia’s 1995 SMD races; there is less than a one-tenth of a Henry E. Hale 9 one percent chance that this finding is random. The substantive magnitude of big party affiliation, however, remains relatively small (nomination appears to have given them a ballot boost of just more than 3 percent), but this effect is still more significant than the estimated effect for belonging to any old party, big or small. In addition, many of the 1995 Duma races were decided by less than three percent of the vote, giving candidates a real incentive to seek big party nomination to increase their chances of victory. Party affiliation, therefore, had a significant positive impact, but was clearly not the most important factor in these races. An alternative interpretation of the results reported in Table 3, however, is that parties might be attracted to the candidates who were already the most promising before the nomination season began. This could also explain why the strongest candidates tended to be party nominees. While this reportedly has been the cases in some instances, this does not appear to have happened in the majority of cases of which I am aware. In addition, this possibility does not necessarily deny the importance of parties since the candidates themselves saw fit for some reason to join.5 Indeed, one important function of parties is to recruit promising new leaders. Finally, however, this “candidate-driven” attraction alone cannot explain why some parties would be more successful at attracting the best candidates than others, and once factors like ideology and organization are brought in to explain these candidates’ choices of parties, one is already talking about parties that organize voter choice in a meaningful way. 6 To gain confidence that voters in 1995 were in fact backing candidates at least in part according to party affiliation (and not only because parties managed to recruit the a priori strongest candidates), we can test a second hypothesis. If parties do not matter in the single-mandate-district voting, we should not expect to find a strong district-level correlation between the SMD balloting outcomes and the vote totals garnered by parties in the PR race. Table 4 reports the results of running a regression where candidate vote percentages are the dependent variable and where the independent variable is the share of the vote garnered by each candidate’s own party in the PR competition in that candidate’s own electoral district (okrug).7

5 For an example in Bashkortostan, see McFaul and Petrov (1998: 92). 6 One must keep in mind a possible nuance in interpreting these results, however. Although parties certainly did appear to help average candidates in 1995, they still may have hurt those candidates who already had a widespread reputation and organization of th eir own and who could successfully run on a platform of being above partisan politics. For example, in one Perm Oblast district in 1995, the former Russian Prosecutor General known for his investigation of the August 1991 coup-plotters (Stepankov) contested a Duma seat but refused to join a political party so as not to compromise his image of independence. This means that parties may help most candidates, but not all. 7 I plan to add an EI analysis to confirm these results very soon. 10 The Party’s On

Table 4: Relationship between SMD and PR Voting, 1995 Number of observations = 1457 R-squared = 0.4297 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

Standard Independent Variable Coefficient t-Statistic Error Number of Rivals -.4153777 .0404279 0.000 PR Vote for Candidate’s Party .703352 .0238152 0.000 Constant 9.307986 .6123319 0.000

As is evident in the table, our confidence that the PR and SMD voting is linked is extremely strong--the regression analysis estimates that there is less than a tenth of a one percent chance that the observed correlation has occurred by chance. To get an idea of the nature of this correlation, the estimated coefficient of .7 suggests that a one-percent rise in a candidate’s party’s popularity in the district tended to translate into a .7 percent rise in the level of support for the candidate, him or herself. This is not surprising if we expect a party’s reputation to affect the performance of the individuals who belong to that party; party popularity boosts a candidate, but not with complete efficiency. Much still clearly depends on the individual qualities of the pretender to office. An alternative interpretation of these results, of course, is that the popularity of the local candidate is determining the local support for the party, suggesting that the party is still, in fact, very dependent on the individuals that it contains and has little independent impact. Petrov (1995: 33–34), for example, finds that all of the major parties except Our Home is Russia received more party list votes in those districts where they had SMD candidates running. He also reveals that many parties garnered a greater share of the votes than did their parties in districts where a given party was running an SMD candidate of its own. To examine this possibility, I ran the above regression in reverse, treating the PR vote percentages in each district as the dependent variable and the individual party-affiliated candidates’ share of the ballots as the independent variable. As Table 5 shows, the correlation is again found to be extremely strong, although the coefficient estimated for the effect of individual candidate performance on party performance is somewhat smaller that estimated for the effect of party support on candidate performance; .53 instead of .7. Henry E. Hale 11

Table 5: Predicted Effects of SMD Results on District PR Vote, 1995 Number of observations = 1457 R-squared = 0.3894 Dependent variable = PR vote for candidate’s party in a given district

Independent Variable Coefficient Standard Error t-Statistic Number of Rivals .060032 .0364178 0.099 SMD Party Candidate .5331018 .0180506 0.000 Results Constant 1.36262 .5727807 0.017

This provides at least weak support for the claim that party affiliation is the most important driving force in the tandem between SMD candidate support and party performance, although it must be stressed that this difference is not clear and large enough to sustain confident claims. Nevertheless, it remains suggestive and points in the direction of party strength rather than weakness. Moreover, much of Petrov’s results mentioned above can be explained by the fact that parties were more likely to nominate candidates in those districts where they had the strongest organizations, the strongest preexisting support levels, or the strongest candidates, all of which could be expected to be correlated. 8 More important, however, is another conclusion evident from Tables 4 and 5. Even if we assume that local support for the federal party depends wholly upon the popularity of the local candidate, this already means that voters are not simply orienting to the personality of the central leader of a given party (i.e., Yavlinsky, Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov…), but are also attaching importance to other figures in the party. The implied importance of local figures as well as the central ones does suggest that political parties in Russia are developing some organizational breadth; voters appear not only to be voting for personality but to be linking different

8 As to his finding of variation in whether a candidate did better than his/her party or vice versa across parties, much of this is likely to depend on the irregularity in the number of candidates in each district (and therefore the number of people competing for the same electorates) as well as on the crowdedness of the field of parties competing for the same electorate as well as the peculiarities of the electorates and candidates/parties themselves. In this regard, since the LDPR is a highly personalized party, it is not surprising that the party fares much better in the PR race (where people vote for Zhirinovsky more or less directly) and in the SMD races where they are voting for a very different person, albeit one associated with Zhirinovsky. The benefit of the present study is that it systematically examines the correlation between the PR and SMD voting, although it is highly likely that Petrov is right to identify variation in the degree of this correlation across parties. 12 The Party’s On important personalities in their minds along party lines, as is evidenced in the strong correlation between PR and SMD voting results at the district level. The most reasonable interpretation would seem to be that both phenomena are occurring to some degree, as is undoubtedly the case even in the oldest of multiparty democracies: popular parties boost their own candidates and the strongest candidates boost the image of their party. The bottom line for Russia, of course, is simply that parties are beginning to matter. It is at least possible, of course, that we would find such a correlation even where parties were known to have no impact since, assuming that people vote for the candidates and parties closest to their own views, a party and an individual voicing very similar platforms would be expected to get similar shares of the vote anyway. This certainly does not rule out the conclusion that parties are important, of course, and Aldrich’s theory of party utility assumes precisely this effect, although he posits that party affiliation plays a critical role in enabling voters to determine that a given candidate is indeed close to their views. In addition, many of these races involved a vast number of candidates (up to 24 in a single SMD district and 43 in the party race), many undoubtedly espousing similar views, making the kind of very strong correlation that we find in Table 4 unlikely if parties themselves did not play some role in communicating the views of candidates and in linking candidates to parties with certain views. Moreover, the results presented earlier on the impact of parties in SMD races is not vulnerable to this charge of “omitted variable bias,” and, in fact, does not involve the PR race at all. Overall, the results from these two separate tests converge to confirm that political parties had come to play a significant positive role in Russian Duma elections by just the second set of multiparty elections in 1995. We can augment our confidence in this conclusion by breaking down the results to examine the relative impact of individual parties, seeing whether some parties (as would naturally be expected) had a positive impact on candidates’ performances significantly greater than the 3.4 percent boost found to derive from nomination by the biggest parties. Importantly, we can also see whether the patterns we find make sense, or whether they instead have the feel of randomness. In the paragraphs that follow, therefore, I first examine the individual party breakdown from 1993 before turning to that of 1995 and exploring explanations for parties’ differential impacts. Table 6 thus reports the results of a big regression analysis of all Russian SMD Duma races in 1993 including a separate “dummy” variable to test the independent effects of each of the 13 parties that nominated candidates. This breakdown reveals striking uniformity among parties in the negative impact on their own candidates’ performances. Of 13 parties, we have greater than 98 percent confidence that nine hurt their candidates more than they helped them. This includes not only the parties that failed Henry E. Hale 13 to clear the five-percent barrier in the PR voting (such as Future Russia– New Names, Civic Union and the Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms), but also parties that formed significant fractions in the Duma such as Yabloko (whose nomination appears to have cost its candidates over five percentage points at the polls), PRES (a five percent negative impact) and the Democratic Party of Russia (a 7 percent negative impact). Nevertheless, there were a few parties that appear to have broken that negative trend. The only party to have given a substantial electoral boost to its own SMD candidates was the party Women of Russia, whose candidates did nearly nine percentage points better in their races than candidates without their party’s nomination. This result passes the 95- percent statistical significance test usually demanded by analysts as an indicator of confidence in regression findings. Three other parties were found to have no statistically significant impact on their SMD candidates’ performances, the Communist Party (KPRF), the Agrarian Party, and Russia’s Choice, the pro-Yeltsin “party of power” in 1993. While this is hardly a desirable result for these parties, it does indicate that some parties were closer to bringing their candidates benefits than were others.

Table 6: Effects of Individual Parties on Candidate Results, 1993 Number of observations = 1519 R-squared = 0.3018 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

Independent Variable Coefficient Standard Error t-Statistic Number of Rivals -1.81205 .0799352 0.000 Agrarian Party .9205982 1.329378 0.489 Civic Union -4.534714 1.284822 0.000 Honor & Dignity -2.713735 2.723105 0.319 DPR -6.993039 1.43167 0.000 Future Russia New Names -8.079599 1.857129 0.000 KEDR -7.194701 2.258931 0.001 Communist Party (KPRF) -.1583434 1.457446 0.913 LDPR -3.347786 1.409017 0.018 PRES -5.268516 1.37653 0.000 RDDR -5.856223 1.409302 0.000 Russia’s Choice (VR) 1.406796 1.084683 0.195 Women of Russia 8.82025 4.282597 0.040 14 The Party’s On

Yabloko -5.28112 1.190806 0.000 Constant 31.1128 .7557708 0.000 The results from 1995 reveal a very different picture, although it does suggest that those parties showing the most promise (however scant) in 1993 were mostly able to translate potential into action in 1995. Table 7 thus reports the results of the 1995 regression analysis including a separate “dummy” variable for each of the ten biggest parties as defined above. The most dramatic result is that five parties had come to have a positive effect on their candidates’ performances. There is more than a 99.9 percent probability that the Communist, Our Home is Russia, Yabloko, and Agrarian parties gave an electoral boost to their nominees, and there is more than a 98 percent chance that Russia’s Democratic Choice also had such an effect. On the other hand, we have little confidence that the LDPR, Communists for the USSR, KRO, the Rybkin Blok and Forward Russia had any effect at all on their nominees’ performance. Nevertheless, it is significant that none of the 10 biggest parties had a statistically significant negative effect on their SMD candidates in 1995, a fact tending to discredit the arguments of the most pessimistic theorists on Russian party development.

Table 7: Effects of Individual Parties on Candidate Results, 1995 Number of observations = 2625 R-squared = 0.2622 Dependent variable = percentage of votes won by SMD candidate

Standard Independent Variable Coefficient t-Statistic Error Number of Rivals -.6044184 .0325891 0.000 Communist Party 14.06921 .6969703 0.000 Our Home is Russia (NDR) 5.03591 .7711952 0.000 LDPR -.7173735 .5894701 0.224 Yabloko 4.710676 .9356484 0.000 Communists for the USSR .1518987 .9773741 0.877 KRO .1089566 .8336097 0.896 Agrarian Party (APR) 6.741871 .8395094 0.000 Bloc of Ivan Rybkin -.2829264 .9703697 0.771 Russia’s Democratic Choice 2.078928 .8715517 0.017 Forward Russia! -1.236577 .9488415 0.193 Henry E. Hale 15

Constant 14.64483 .4873984 0.000

These results invite some preliminary speculation on the causes of this variation, giving us a clearer idea of what particular party characteristics are correlated with party success in Russia’s single-mandate districts. Most importantly, these results suggest that party success in Russian SMD races can come from the combination of an active local organization and what Hale (1999) has called an “institutionalized electorate,” a set of people possessing a strong group self-consciousness due to Soviet-era policies and institutions that defined important opportunity sets and treated people differently on the basis of these categories. Both of the parties that had the greatest positive impact in 1995 and did not hurt their candidates in 1993 appear to be among those with the strongest organizational component and those appealing to a specific institutionalized electorate. Most obviously, the Communist Party clearly had a powerful local infrastructure to back its candidates, and this surely contributed to its strong showing in 1995. The Communist Party also had a loyal base of “party-identified” voters left over from the days of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a fact that is generally undisputed among political specialists. Its relatively poor performance in 1993 does not cast doubt on this. After Yeltsin violated the Constitution to call elections and put his own new Constitution to referendum, the Communist Party was seriously divided over whether to participate in these elections, which they openly declared illegitimate, with many local organizations refusing to nominate candidates or campaign actively and with the central organization providing little in the way of direction, financing or even interest (Hough 1998: 674). The Communists, therefore, did not fare well in 1993 but achieved a breakthrough election in 1995. The Agrarian Party may provide the strongest support for concluding that the combination of local organization and an institutionalized electorate is critical. As I have argued elsewhere, the agrarian population in many parts of Russia can be seen as a potent institutionalized electorate, having been treated as a separate class by Soviet institutions and having therefore come to develop a perception of common interests in state policies. While its showing in the 1993 SMD elections was not strong, as shown in Table 6, the Agrarians nevertheless managed to overcome many of the problems facing other parties and became one of only four competing associations not actually to harm their candidates in the SMD voting. The most telling evidence that organization and institutionalized electorates are key comes from 1995, however. It is striking that the Agrarians, who won the second most seats in the SMDs (20), did not clear the five-percent barrier in the PR voting this time around. One explanation is that the party did not have a strong infrastructure in every region (probably not even in a majority), helping to account for its low 16 The Party’s On overall vote total when all Russian regions were counted. 9 But there were many regions where it did have a very strong local organization in 1995, and in these regions it did extremely well. The contrast between Bashkortostan and Perm in this regard is telling. In Bashkortostan, the Agrarian Party had not only its own structure, but relied heavily on the local agro-industrial trade unions and also enjoyed the support of the Agrarian Union, something resembling an Agricultural Extension service, which provided staff and active support to Agrarian candidates. As I have argued elsewhere, the Agrarian organizational structure has proven particularly effective at signaling to an institutionalized electorate of (former) collective farmers (Hale 1998, 1999). In contrast, while the region of Perm also had a significant agricultural sector, there was no Agrarian Party structure significantly visible in this province (McFaul and Petrov 1998: 778–782). In fact, the Agrarian Party did not nominate a single candidate in any of Perm’s four electoral districts and got just three percent of the vote in the district PR race. While the roots of this regional organizational weakness are still unclear, what does seem clear is that agrarians do not automatically vote Agrarian, but that a strong local organization can very effectively point them in that direction. Both the Communist Party and the Agrarian Party, then, reflect the importance of strong organizations signaling to institutionalized electorates. Both the Communists and the Agrarians had such powerful and already self-conscious constituencies that were predisposed to support them, but strong campaign organization was required to mobilize these electorates in the desired direction. The observed impact of Our Home is Russia in 1995 also supports the importance of organization, although it also suggests some limits to the potency of what have often been called “parties of power.” Our Home was formed from the top down, with presidential structures and presidentially appointed heads of provincial administration taking the lead. This ensured that Our Home had a strong organizational foundation in most regions of Russia, something that appears to have contributed to the vote totals of its candidates. Nevertheless, a five-percent boost is far less than had been expected from a movement with the immense power of the Russian presidency (not to mention Prime Minister) at its disposal. Indeed, the non-governmental structures of not only the Communists but also the Agrarians appears to have been even more effective. To be sure,

9 In 1993, the Agrarians’ strong showing in the PR race (it cleared the five-percent barrier) can be explained in part by its appeal to voters of the Communist Party, which was very ambivalent in its participation in these elections. Indeed, one of its leaders, Ivan Rybkin, who became the first speaker of the Duma, had been the Communist faction leader in the previous parliament. In 1995, in SMDs where the Agrarians nominated a candidate, it did clear the 5-percent barrier, garnering 5.24 percent of the vote, only marginally down from its 1993 overall total and almost twice as many votes as districts where the APR did not nominate any candidate. See Petrov (1995: 33–34). Henry E. Hale 17 the Rybkin Bloc was also initiated by President Yeltsin in 1995, yet if anything, it had negative impact on its candidates. These patterns do suggest, however, that what is important is less a party of federal power as a party of regional power. Thus Our Home was supported by some regional leaders, but not all, partially accounting for its less-than-stellar performance. This also helps us explain the strength of the Agrarian Party in Bashkortostan, the powerful president of which has seen fit to support this party in elections to federal organs of power, certainly contributing both to its electoral success directly and to its ability to form a strong local organization. The fate of Vybor Rossii (Russia’s Choice) in 1993 reinforces these conclusions. As the “party of power” that preceded Our Home, Russia’s Choice enjoyed the strong backing of presidential structures and mass media. This was enough to prevent its endorsement from being a minus, but it was not enough to give its SMD candidates a significant boost overall. Clearly, organization is not everything. Yabloko was only starting to form regional structures outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1995, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) has had relatively strong local organizations since after the 1993 campaigns. Both Yabloko and the LDPR failed to help their candidates in 1993, perhaps even having negative effects on them, and Yabloko’s candidates actually fared worse than those of the LDPR that year. Yet by 1995, Yabloko had managed to produce a strong positive effect on its nominees while the LDPR still had none. Yabloko’s position as the strongest liberal party not “tainted” by past or present involvement in government failures certainly positioned it well to gain votes on this “ideological” basis, although one can certainly speculate that the growth of strong regional organizations will significantly enhance its positive effects on its voters. Indeed, ideological orientation surely contributed to the success of the Communists and the Agrarians and the poorer-than-expected showing of Our Home is Russia since the former represented opposition to the government and the latter represented the government itself at a time when government actions in both the economy and Chechnya were quite unpopular. But, as mentioned before, the combination of the Agrarian Party’s weakness in the PR race and its strength in the SMDs is very hard to explain without looking primarily to organization. While, as Steven Hanson has argued, the LDPR does feature a developed ideology, it is an ideology that is widely considered to be radical and that is often overwhelmed in the public eye by the attention placed on the personality of its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Indeed, another phenomenon in evidence is the failure of the most explicitly leader-centric parties in both 1993 and 1995, notably Zhirinovsky’s LDPR and ex-Agrarian and ex-Communist Ivan Rybkin’s new, and modestly named, “Blok of Ivan Rybkin.” The nonexistent effects of these parties on their SMD candidates certainly suggests that focusing 18 The Party’s On too heavily on the appeal of a single leader does not do much to help local candidates. These candidates will ultimately win or lose primarily on their own merits since they cannot themselves hope to replicate the supposed personal appeal of their leader and these blocs leave their ideology open to more guessing. Thus the LDPR gained 11 percent of the vote across Russia when Zhirinovsky was the central figure, but won only one seat in the territorial districts. Rybkin’s appeal was relatively low to begin with outside of political elite circles, making his decision to form a leader- centric party particularly unfortunate. Finally, Women of Russia’s strong performance also deserves attention. In 1993, this movement surprised observers by easily clearing the five-percent barrier in the PR race, a strength matched in the SMDs as it was the only party with a statistically and substantively significant positive impact on its SMD candidates, apparently giving them nearly a nine percent boost at the polls. While this party nominated only a few candidates in territorial districts in 1995, it nevertheless continued to have a significant positive impact, giving them on average a 3.6 percent lift in voting results. There is greater than a 95 percent chance that this correlation was not generated randomly. While women do not fit the definition of “institutionalized electorate,” they nevertheless remain a constituency that had been made politically aware in Soviet Russia and their message that women need to be represented in the top echelons of power struck a powerful chord in 1993, fading somewhat in 1995. Nevertheless, given that Women of Russia had very little organization on the ground in either election, its success is probably most accurately attributed not to the party as such but instead to the fact that its candidates were women and therefore stood out in the testosterone-laden candidate pools typical of today’s Russia. In analyzing these results, however, one must be aware of the likely influence of party strategy on the size of the boost registered in these data. Parties could choose how many candidates to nominate in SMDs, and some like the LDPR tried to register candidates in all regions while others like the APR and Yabloko generally nominated candidates only in those regions where they had a strong candidate or a strong party presence. Thus one reason why the LDPR may show up in this study as having an insignificant effect on their SMD candidates is that they spread themselves very thin—perhaps they could have achieved a statistical result like that of, say, Yabloko had they registered just 69 SMD candidates (Yabloko’s figure) instead of their 188. This is especially true for the APR, which is very strong in some regions but has made little effort in others. This, of course, does not seriously discount the importance of this paper’s main findings, that parties have come to matter in Russia, but it does suggest that a party’s strength as “measured” in the regressions reported above cannot be assumed to exist equally in all regions of Russia and that we must factor in the number of SMD candidates fielded to determine a more Henry E. Hale 19 reliable “ranking” of parties in terms of effectiveness. This means that the KPRF is likely to be even further ahead of the others than the results show since it nominated candidates in 129 districts and that the relative standing of the LDPR in terms of party effectiveness is likely to be higher than is reflected in these results (Petrov 95). Although one must never place too much faith in regression results when few control variables are available for inclusion in the study, the results presented in this paper do make sense and correspond very well to the results of other data examined by other scholars. Our results, finding that the Communist and Agrarian parties were the strongest in the single- mandate districts, fit with the common wisdom that the Communist Party was the strongest political organization in Russia at that time and the fact that it and the Agrarian Party won the most seats in SMD races, 58 and 20 respectively. Likewise, our study finds that NDR and Yabloko were the third and fourth most potent parties in the SMDs, a result mirrored in the number of seats that parties actually won. In addition, our results are also consistent with the observation by White et al. (1997: 226) that the number of independent candidates winning in the SMDs in 1995 (78) was barely half the number of independents who had won in 1993, a fact testifying to the growing role of parties in Russia. Our more general conclusion about the growing importance of parties is also consistent with important results from other studies of Russian politics. A recent study by Josh Tucker and Ted Brader (1998), based on survey data gathered by Timothy Colton and William Zimmerman in 1995 and 1996, found convincing evidence that party loyalties were indeed beginning to form in the 1995 parliamentary race and that voters did differentiate parties sensibly on the basis of platform differences. White et al. (1997: 230-3), using a different methodology, also found that the major parties had distinctive electorates, that knowing a voter’s views on key issues in 1995 would have allowed one to predict a voter’s party choice far better than by chance. Moreover, the two parties with the most distinctive electorates are the two parties that the present study found to have the greatest impact on their SMD candidates, the Communists and the Agrarians. While this certainly suggests that issues were part of a party’s appeal, it also testifies to the ability of these parties to communicate a message that resonated with voters. The data presented in the present paper shed new light on these different survey findings, indicating that people actually did behave in the way they claimed during the opinion polls and that parties now have a substantial positive impact on their candidates’ chances of winning SMD elections in Russia.

Conclusion This paper has presented strong evidence that certain political parties had come to play an important role not only in Russia’s proportional 20 The Party’s On representation voting, but in the single-mandate district half of the parliamentary elections. In Russia’s first post-communist parliamentary elections, Russia’s parties had an overwhelmingly negative impact, taking votes away from candidates rather than adding them. But the rough estimates presented here show that the situation had changed dramatically by 1995, and that the Communist Party was not the only electorally powerful party in Russia, although it did perform far better than the others. The Agrarian Party also proved to be a significant organizational force, capable of mobilizing a rural constituency that was already self-conscious and inclined to support a party that addressed its vital economic and social concerns directly. Parties of power also appear to have mattered less than is often expected, although it appears that parties of regional power may be more effective than parties of federal power. The most personality-centered parties proved to have little effect on their nominees’ chances, essentially leaving them to fend for themselves and to build up their own reputation. This paper also confirms that ideological positioning vis-à-vis the electorate has important effects on party strength in the SMD voting, although it also establishes that good organization can magnify these effects. John Aldrich (1995: 49) has noted that even United States Congressional races tend to be highly candidate-centered, and this was very likely to be much more true of Russian SMD Duma races in 1995 since political parties had had very little time to evolve into strong organizations with well established reputations. To find evidence of significant party impact in these races in this inhospitable context, then, provides important confirmation for Aldrich’s theory on the utility of political parties. Political parties, it appears, are increasingly important in organizing political choice in Russia and are therefore likely to become more so as more candidates realize their potential.