Party and electoral landscape in the regions of the Russian federation: stability versus volatility : stability versus volatility

Abstract

The regions of Russia demonstrate a high degree of variability in voting for political parties in elections at various levels. This is explained by the fact that in regions with a «hard» political regime, the ruling party dominates the political space, while in «softer» regimes there is a certain degree of electoral competition. In this paper, based on the results of voting for party lists in the elections of the State Duma of the Russian Federation and regional parliaments for the period from 2007 to 2021, it is analyzed how stable the variability of the party and electoral landscape in the constituent entities is, and how the degree of dominance of the ruling party affects the volatility of regional party systems. The analysis shows that the greatest stability is demonstrated by the regions with a «hard» political regime, while the highest volatility of regional party systems is characteristic of the regions with the most «soft» regime. This is explained by the fact that in most constituent entities of the Russian Federation none of the parties of the systemic opposition is perceived as an obvious alternative to the party of power. As a result, «protest votes» are distributed either among all opposition parties, or go to one or the other party, and differently in
different regions and in different elections. At the same time, in some regions there are fairly strong
regional branches of one or another opposition party, which becomes the «main opposition» in the region and, as a rule, receives the votes lost by other parties.