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Regional Elections and Electoral Authoritarianism in Russia

IN THIS STUDY I TEST THE DEMOCRATIC INTEGRITY of regional assembly elections which were conducted in Russia over the period from December 2003 to March 2009. Whilst we should not fall into the electoral fallacy of equating the instigation of elections with democracy, ‘the right to vote in free and fair elections and to hold those in office accountable is surely an essential, if not a sufficient condition for the development of a consolidated democracy’ (Sisk 2001, p. 115). For Schedler, ‘the democratic ideal requires that all citizens enjoy unimpaired opportunities to formulate their political preferences, to signify them to one another, and to have them weighed equally in public decision making’ (Schedler 2002, p. 40). For Diamond, ‘Elections are ‘‘free’’ and fair when the legal barriers to entry into the political arena are low, where there is substantial freedom for candidates and supporters of different political parties to campaign and solicit votes, and when voters experience little or no coercion in exercising their electoral choices’ (Diamond 2002, p. 28). In turn, free and fair elections are impossible without the instigation of other key aspects of ‘liberal democracy’, such as respect for the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the instigation of basic human rights: such as, freedom of the press, assembly, and association. However, as I demonstrate below, regional elections in Russia are still a long way from meeting such criteria. As Petrov concludes, ‘the fate of elections in Russia is more and more often decided not at the polling stations, but in Kremlin offices, courtrooms, and election commission headquarters’ (Petrov 2003, p. 2). For Alexander Lukin, ‘electoral clanism’ rather than electoral democracy, dominates the political landscape in Russia. Here, ‘elections are not a means of selecting public officials according to law, . . . rather they are merely the means of settling disputes among post-totalitarian clans that generally operate outside the law’ (Lukin 1999, p. 108). In democracies, according to O’Donnell (1994, p. 61), ‘accountability runs not only vertically, making elected officials answerable to the ballot box, but also horizontally, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 63, No. 4, June 2011, 641–661