Резюме на английском_Турченко Михаил (1136366)
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National Research UniversityHigher School of EconomicsAs a manuscriptTurchenko Mikhail SergeyevichDETERMINANTS OF CHANGES IN RUSSIA’S REGIONALELECTORAL SYSTEMS, 2003–2016SUMMARY OF THE DISSERTATIONfor the purpose of obtaining academic degreeDoctor of Philosophy in Political Science HSEAcademic Supervisor:Candidate of Sciences Andrey StarodubtsevMoscow, 2018I. Research designResearch problem statement. The literature on political institutionsin nondemocratic regimes has been developing since the early 2000s(Schedler 2013, p.5; Gehlbach, Sonin & Svolik 2016, p.566).
Despite thefact that scholars have revealed that genuinely democratic political institutions matter in authoritarian regimes, although with different functions thanin democracies (Magaloni 2006; Gandhi 2008; Schedler 2013), there arestill gaps in understanding the role of some democratic electoral institutionsin undemocratic settings. One such institution is the electoral system1. Whydo some authoritarian regimes use electoral rules which, by their mechanical effects, almost do not give the opposition a chance to gain any parliamentary representation (Tan 2013), while others (Stroh 2010) apply moreinclusive2 rules? What role does electoral engineering play in autocracies?Data from Russian regional legislative elections since 2003 give anopportunity to answer these questions.
According to the 2002 reform ofRussia’s regional election law (hereafter – the 2002 electoral reform), sinceJuly 15, 2003 all regions have been obliged to elect no less than half of themembers of their assemblies by proportional representation (PR) 3. As a result, significant variation appeared in the following dimensions of regionalelectoral systems: methods for allocating list seats, legal electoral thresholds, and the shares of deputies that were to be elected by PR. Followingthe reform, profound changes have also occurred in the size of regional assemblies, a similarly important dimension of the electoral system.
By Sep-1The term electoral system is used here to signify a tool that determines how votes are converted intoseats in the process of electing politicians into offices (Gallagher & Mitchell 2005, p.3; Farrell 2011, p.4).2By an inclusive electoral system I mean the set of rules which prevent a single party from gaining enormous advantages at the expense of other parties (Carey 2018, p.86).3This rule was in force until the end of 2013 when the federal center decided to cut the minimal share ofPR deputies at regional elections to 25 per cent and allowed the two biggest Russian cities – Moscow andSt. Petersburg – to elect their legislative bodies by a single-member plurality system (SMP).2tember 2016, the total number of changes in the aforementioned dimensions of electoral systems amounted to more than 200.The switch of the Russian regions to the new electoral rules coincided with the consolidation of the electoral authoritarian regime at the national level (Golosov 2011; Gel’man 2015; Gill 2016).
At the same time, thereremained disparities across the Russian regions with respect to a widerange of important dimensions, including political ones.The thesis is aimed to answer the following research question: whatfactors influenced the results of electoral engineering in the Russian regions over the period between 2003 and 2016?Literature review. The research is focused on the politics of electoral systems, the distinctive features of electoral process in authoritarianregimes, and the evolution of Russian electoral system along with the transformations of electoral systems in the Russian regions. Therefore, thisstudy relied on three strands of research literature.The first of these strands deals with the political effects of electoralsystems (the electoral system as an independent variable) and electoral system changes (the electoral system as a dependent variable).M.
Duverger (2007) and D. W. Rae (1971) were the first to drawscholarly attention to the political effects of electoral systems. Since thesecond half of the 1980s the study of electoral laws’ political effects hasmoved to the center of comparative political science. Among the scholarswho contributed to this field were R.
Taagepera and M. S. Shugart (1989),A. Blais (1991), M. Gallagher (1992), A. Lijphart (1994), P. C. Ordeshookand O. V. Shvetsova (1994), O. Amorim Neto and G. W. Cox (1997), G.W. Cox (1998), K. Benoit (2000), P. Norris (2004), W. R. Clark and M.Golder (2006), D. M. Farrell (2011). Among the most important electoralsystem dimensions with respect to their political effects they highlightedballot structure, district magnitude, electoral formula, and assembly size.3Electoral systems as effects or byproducts of political actors’ considerations first caught scholarly attention in the late 1950s (Grumm 1958),although research attention to the electoral system as a dependent variableintensified much later thanks to J. M. Colomer (2004, 2005, 2018), K.
Benoit (2004, 2007), J. T. Andrews and R. W. Jackman (2005), S. Bowler, T.Donovan and J. A. Karp (2006), P. Norris (2011). The studies of electoralsystem reforms in European countries at the turn of the twentieth centuryhave a separate place within this literature (Rokkan 1970; Boix 1999, 2010;Cusack, Iversen & Soskice 2007, 2010; Kreuzer 2010; Ahmed 2010).
Itwas found that the rational calculations of political actors play a leadingrole among the factors influencing the design of electoral system.The second strand of the literature addressed in the research dealswith the distinctive features of electoral process in authoritarian regimes,where authoritarian practices are placed behind the institutional facades ofrepresentative democracy.The electoral process in authoritarian regimes is usually interpretedfrom the electoral malpractice perspective. “The menu of manipulation” atthe disposal of authoritarian incumbents is diverse: from prevention of certain parties and politicians from entering the electoral competition to electoral fraud (Schedler 2002).
Electoral engineering is also on this “menu”.The literature on electoral engineering in autocracies is relativelyscarce (Diaz-Cayeros & Magaloni 2001; Lust-Okar & Jamal 2002; Stroh2010; Tan 2013; Higashijima & Chang 2016; Gandhi & Heller 2018), and,with rare exceptions (Higashijima & Chang 2016), is case oriented. In addition, there are studies explaining why some autocracies use widespread andblatant electoral manipulations in the course of the elections, while othersrely on electoral manipulations to a lesser degree (Birch 2011; Simpser2013; Rozenas 2016; Rundlett & Svolik 2016; Birch & van Ham 2017).4J.
Gandhi and E. Lust-Okar (2009, p.412) point out that electoral engineering both in authoritarian regimes and democracies may be similar, atleast in regard to the fact that ruling elites are interested in the rules whichare beneficial for them and unfavourable for the opposition. Following thislogic, electoral systems in autocracies should always be highly disproportional in order to skew the level playing field for the incumbent’s sake. Atthe same time, in addition to those authoritarian regimes in which electoralrules by their mechanical effects significantly limit the opposition’s chances of parliamentary representation (Tan 2013), there are autocracies whichemploy more inclusive systems (Stroh 2010).
Despite some attempts to explain why autocracies use different electoral formulas – proportional or majoritarian (Higashijima & Chang 2016) – the question concerning the general logic of electoral engineering in electoral authoritarian regimes is stillunanswered. The rules under which authoritarian elections are held are stillunderstudied (Gandhi & Heller 2018, p.388).The third strand of the literature relevant for the thesis concerns thestudy of Russian electoral system and the electoral systems in the Russianregions. There is plenty of works on the reforms of Russian electoral system (Remington & Smith 1996; McFaul 1999; White & McAllister 1999;Gel’man 1999; Moser & Thames 2001; Birch et al. 2002; Moraski 2007,2009; Smyth, Lowry & Wilkening 2007; Wilson 2009; White &Kryshtanovskaya 2011; Sheinis 2014; Golosov 2017).
Summing up theirfindings, one can conclude that electoral reforms were in force when theexecutive branch de facto headed by the president, striving for maximumcontrol over the legislative process, was interested in such implementationand there were no other veto players able to block the passage of the law.The literature on electoral reforms in the Russian regions is not soprofound. The motivation of the Russian regions for choosing particularelectoral rules in the 1990s was considered by B.
Moraski (2006). Some5explanations of the Russian regions’ choice of certain electoral system dimensions after the 2002 electoral reform were presented by P. V. Panov(2004), L. V. Smorgunov (2006), E. A. Al’tova (2007), G. V. Golosov(2013). The principal finding in these works was that the executive authority, both federal and regional, played a leading role in the politics of electoral system at the level of Russian entities. In addition to the abovementioned works there are some studies which included the thick description ofthe regional electoral system transformations after the 2002 electoral reform (Kynev 2009, 2014; Lyubarev 2010; Kynev & Lyubarev 2011). It isworth noting that none of the works cited tried to propose an explanation tothe general logic of electoral system engineering at the regional level.The aim of this study is to identify the factors that influenced theresults of electoral engineering in the Russian regions in the period of2003-2016.
To reach this aim the following objectives were put forward:1) to analyse the literature on political effects of electoral systemsand causes of electoral reforms in order to determine what political actors and under what circumstances could be interestedin electoral engineering;2) to extract from works on electoral manipulations in autocraciesthe incumbents’ preference model for some types of electoralmanipulation over others;3) to observe the studies on the Russian electoral system reformsand the reforms of electoral systems in the Russian regions aswell as works on Russian political regime changes during thestudy period;4) to select and describe the model for the empirical analysis, topropose some hypotheses about electoral engineering in theRussian regions based on this model, to construct the operational definitions for all variables employed in this study;65) to check proposed hypotheses and to make conclusions regarding the factors of electoral engineering in the Russian regions.Rational choice institutionalism was chosen as the methodologicalfoundation of empirical research presented in this thesis.
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