15 the Party's On

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.

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