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Contemporary Developments in Russia’s Federal and Local Elections: On the Way to a Cohesive Party System?

This research analyzes the differences between municipal elections in large and medium-sized Russian cities (more than 100,000 citizens) and federal elections to representative bodies for the period from 2003 to 2018. The empirical evidence includes 210 municipal electoral campaigns in 119 cities and 4 federal legislative campaigns for comparison. We examine these differences using the notion of the party system nationalization, which is measured by comparing turnout and voting for political parties at different territorial levels in the same cities, and by party system inflation (with the use of the effective number of parties – an index that allows a comparison of election competitiveness at different administrative levels). Most of the cases are midterm municipal elections held separately between the federal campaigns. However, we draw special attention to the differences when federal and municipal campaigns overlap. The results showed some progress in the process of the nationalization of the Russian party system which is indicated by the rapprochement of the degree of competitiveness in the federal and municipal elections and, later, by the likeliness of electoral preferences at different territorial levels.