Interim Report Component #1




Research Paper










Project Title:
How electoral systems affect democratic accountability in Russian regions




Aitalina Azarova
Central European University
International Policy Fellowship

Budapest, Hungary
2004




Table of contents:
Introduction
1. Historical background of regional elections
2. Parties in regions – empirical overview.
3. Effects of electoral systems
4. Preliminary thoughts on the effects of electoral systems on accountability
Conclusion

Introduction

The high level of party underdevelopment and fragmentation, persistent for the entire last decade, has its roots in the Russian communist and early post-communist history. Social atomisation as a consequence of communist rule prevented the rise of interest politics; the legacies of patrimonial communism undermined political parties by supporting personalistic and clientelistic networks, and the organisational characteristics of the democratic movement allowed its legacies to be viewed as ‘anti-party’(Golosov, 2000). All these factors contributed to party underdevelopment and generally to anti-party attitudes among the electorate. At the same time, the legacies of the perestroika-era political mobilisation have led to emergence of the non-political entrepreneurship of the elite, and to a territorially diffuse mode of party formation (Gelman, Golosov, eds. 1999). The weakness of the civil society has inspired interest groups’ attempts to obtain direct political representation, and the fragmentation of parties also corresponds to the struggles for resources waged by economic elite groups.  As a result, the Russian partisan map is highly fragmented. Many regional parties can be portrayed as small, unstable personality cliques (Ostrow, 1999, 231), while the role of the federal parties on the regional level is fairly limited. Even though parties contested in more than 80% of regions, the share of the seats they won was quite insignificant (13%, 22% and 14% in three successive electoral cycles).

Moreover, among federal parties, those who are more firmly based on ideological platforms, except for the Communists, are becoming less influential in regional politics, unless their ideologies are conveyed by authoritative regional politicians (Kynev, 2003). Given all these observations, one can question whether there are opportunities for parties to participate in regional elections and influence regional-level politics. More specifically, how does the electoral formula influence the performance of the legislature, especially its accountability? In the following sections I outline the history of the Russian regional elections, underscoring the party participation in them. Secondly, I give a brief empirical overview of the party politics in regional arenas. Thirdly, the overall effects of the electoral systems, and the likely effects of the introduction of list proportional representation as a compulsory element of the electoral system will be presented. Finally, I will consider the possible impact of different on accountability of the regional governments.
My hypothesis



1. Historical background of regional elections


Regional executives (then committee first secretaries) began to be elected on a competitive basis from 1987 onwards , when committee members voted by secret ballot. The first direct elections to the top executive posts started in 1990-1991, when the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg and the presidents of the national republics were elected. Following the August 1991 coup attempt, a moratorium was imposed on further elections, and Yeltsin appointed heads of administrations in remaining fifty-five regions by decree (Moser, 2003). Eight elections were held in 1993, not long before another moratorium, following the stand-off between the president and the parliament in October, and only one election was held before August 1995. The first mass wave of elections occurred in 1995-1997, followed by a second cycle in 1998-2001, and a third in 2002-2004.

Elections to the regional legislature followed a similar logic, though with some distinct differences . The first semi-free regional legislative elections can be traced back to March 1990, when elections to the regional Soviets were held. At the end 1991 three republics elected their Soviets, followed by moderate wave of legislative elections in other regions. However, these elections were characterised by a rather pre-democratic context and absence of party participation (Golosov, 2003, 61). In 1993, these formations were dissolved in all regions except for national republics . After the events of 1993, and the ratification of a new Constitution, regional ‘interim’ legislatures were elected for two-year term. Not all of the elections took place within required time span, namely late 1993 to the first half of 1994; some were postponed until the end of 1994 and even December 1995 , in some regions the two year term was extended or reduced. The first wave of mass elections started in December 1995, and this date can be considered as the beginning of the first regional electoral cycle, which lasted till 1997. The second cycle can be fairly precisely dated to 1998-2001, the third to 2000-2003.

Even though the executive elections started earlier, it took longer for them to assume regularity, mostly due to actions undertaken by federal authorities in postponing elections, such as moratoria in 1991 and 1994. However, the pattern of holding regular regional executive elections was established in the second electoral cycle, while legislative elections become regular already in the first (Golosov, 2003, 67)

The Federal Law “On Basic Guarantees of Citizens’ Electoral Rights enacted in 1994, established a loose legal framework for the regional electoral systems. The delineation of powers between the tiers of the federation left the regions with the privilege of selecting the size of the legislative assembly, the threshold level, the rules for the formation of the party list, the method of the distribution of the public mandates, and the choice between open and closed lists. The law excluded the use of administrative borders as a basis for electoral districting, but many regions still used them or switched to bicameralism. Gradually, in the regions other than republic, the administrative-territorial districts disappeared (Golosov, 2003). Up until July 2003, regional governments also had a choice of electoral formula, and the regions were permitted to use four basic formulae if enacted by regional law: single-member plurality, multi-member plurality, two-round majority, and mixed electoral systems, involving proportional representation. Starting from July 2003, half of the deputies in regional assemblies must be elected proportionally by party lists.

2. Parties in regions - empirical overview

The particular configuration of electoral systems in individual regions emerged largely as a product of the bargaining of the elites on the regional level, rather than the result of directives or pressures from the federal authorities (Golosov, 2003, 211). Frequently in the period from 1993 to 1996, incumbent governors used their influence over regional assemblies in drafting the regulations for elections to bias the outcome in their favour: they used their offices and public officials for unofficial electoral campaigning; they also often manipulated the time of elections, length of campaigns and electoral threshold  to suit their interests and to the disadvantage of the opposing candidates (Moses, 2003, 151) .

The variety of electoral formulae used in Russian regional elections in the period 1993-2003, can be divided into six main categories (Golosov, 2003, 215):
- two-round majority (TRM)
- a plurality system in single-member districts, SMP
- plurality rule in multi-member district (MMP), when a voter has number of votes equal to the number of seats
- mixed system with proportional representation (PR)
- single non-transferable vote (SNTV), when voters are endowed with only one vote in single member districts and  multi-members district alike
- party multimember plurality (PMMP)

The distribution between these types is represented in the Table 1, with combined systems referring to the cases of combination of different formulas, such as TRM+SNTVM, or SMP+PMMP, etc.

Table 1. Share of the electoral systems in the Russian Regions, in percent, by Electoral Cycle*
    1st Electoral Cycle    2nd Electoral Cycle    3rd Electoral Cycle
Mixed    3.5    5.9    4.8
TRM    8.2    7.1    6.0
SMP    65.9    60.0    72.6
MMP    8.2    7.1    7.1
SMP+MMP    14.1    18.8    4.8
Combined    -    1.2    4.8
Total    99.9    100.1    100.1

*Derived from the table in Golosov (2003,217)

Despite switches from one formula to another in individual regions, the distribution among the types remained relatively stable. Majority systems slightly lost popularity from being used in seven regions to five, the mixed system increased its share from the first to the second cycle and then declined again, while plurality rule was most widespread system and became increasingly pervasive, operating in 84.6% of the regions. Taking into account the number of regions which use plurality in their mixed and combined systems, the number is even higher: 92,8%.


During the period from 1993 to 2003, when proportional representation from the national party-lists was not an obligatory requirement for the formation of regional assemblies, such circumstances as wide inter-regional differences, federalism, and the electorate’s interest in political issues of local salience favoured the formation of regional blocks from the regional branches of the federal parties, rather than the development of purely federal parties.

The electoral strategy of parties in executive elections in Russian regions, along with nomination of their own party candidates tended to include efforts to win allegiance and support of candidates who would run anyway. For, example, none of the 26 governors whom Unity claimed to have supported in 2002-3 were actually nominated by the party, they affiliated with the party when already elected. Generally, the scope of party activities in executive elections was low throughout entire decade: out of 459 and 562 candidates who contested second and third cycles of gubernatorial election, only 74 and 46 of them were partisan nominees (Golosov, 2003, 71). Moreover, party nominees tend to be less successful than independents: only 7% of them were successful, as compared to independents, who won in 13% of cases.

However, political parties play considerably greater role in legislative than in executive elections: while party-nominated candidates in gubernatorial elections ran only in 36.8% of regions, and won only in seven percent, partisan nominees for the legislative posts contested elections in 89% of regions and won seats in 67% of regional legislatures. (Golosov, 2003, 71-79). In a number of regions (Sverdlovsk, Tyva, Marii El) strong locally based parties were developed, but in a majority of regions, particularly other than republics, regional political parties were scarce. Federal parties had affiliations in a majority of regions, however only few of them can be described as strong independent organisations based on well-established societal cleavage structures .

Notably, continuing parties are very few: only five parties uninterruptedly participated in all three electoral cycles, namely CPRF, APR, LDPR, DPR and RKRP. Legislators’ and governors’ party affiliations are unstable, and deputies frequently switch allegiance. This is the case with many legislators both at federal and regional level : not only do they change affiliation between factions and deputy groups, they sometimes switch from one party to another. Major and frequent individual re-alignments contribute to a situation when some legislatures end up with a structure entirely different from the one they started the term with. Needless to say, this personalised practice impedes the effective performance of the legislature, and damages credibility regional assembly and legitimacy of the party competition.  

 At regional and local level, high voter volatility and lack of party identification led to the strong personalisation of party politics and a pervasive practice of patron-client relations . Even for CPRF, whose electorate is still sensitive to the party label in their voter choice, the presence/absence of the charismatic leader has become a decisive factor (Turovskii, 2003).  In Svedlovsk oblast’, no matter how the parties were named, the major political struggle was waged between gubernator Rossell , and the mayor of the capital city of the oblast’, Chernetsky . A similar situation occurred in Krasnoyarsk, where the opposition between Uss and Lebed was framed into struggle between the blocks established by the federal parties. The subordination of the regional branches to the federal centre never took place in these regions, and electorate was aware of which of these parties and blocks represented which regional elite groups, not the other way around. In other regions, parties straightforwardly use the names of their leaders in the title of electoral blocks: ‘Blok Bykova’,  ‘Za Lebedya’, ‘Blok Zubova’. Such parties, based on the strength and charismatic personality of one man, often lack serious programs, sound policy proposals, and clear political standpoints. Hence, personified parties lose the ability to represent important societal strata and fail to provide orientation or serve as an object of a political identification (Mayor, 2004, 17).


3. Effects of the electoral systems

The electoral reform law, enacted in 2003, will change the electoral system from predominantly SMP, to a mix of SMD and list PR, stipulating that at least half of deputies must affiliate and run as candidates on federal party lists and nominally vote for the programs and policies of their parties. The reform is aimed at enhancing the independence of regional legislatures as a counter-balance against governors’ dominance. By changing the incentives of politicians to run for seats in regional assemblies it will potentially shift the entire dynamics of executive-legislative relation. The change is expected to be substantial, since the usage of the mixed system will increase from 4.8 to 100% (see Table 1).

The impact of list proportional representation on party formation seems quite straightforward: the list form of candidate nomination makes the proportional representation formula conducive to party formation, since independents are excluded from participation on elections. However, it is sensible to study the different aspects of the process in Russian context so as to answer the question: what kind of parties will likely to form and participate in elections and to what extent they will represent electorate?
Therefore, the electoral reform is aimed to bring following changes into the

The rise of party representation in the regional legislatures, already observable (see Table 1 in Appendix, columns two and three), can be an indicator of the increasing importance of party politics, though several considerations have to be borne in mind. In some regions the suspiciously steep increase in party participation can be accounted for by rather patronymic and clientelistic politics: for example, in Bashkortostan, an outrageously sharp (from 0 to 82%) rise can be entirely attributed to a consequence of the ruling elite decision. Prior to the legislative election they had decided to run their sponsored candidates under the brand of United Russia party. As an result, eighty-nine candidates who are nominally United Russia partisans in fact represent the deputy corpus in support of the gubernator.

As regards the representation of societal groups, the list PR formula is, by definition, a better device than plurality system. If a ‘democratic legislature should be representative of all the interests and viewpoints of the electorate,…the only proper form of representation is proportional representation’ (Lijphart and Grofman, 1984, 5-6). The question is: to what degree do Russian parties represent the interests, attitudes and values of main societal groups? How will better representation of parties in the legislature, which will inevitably occur, translate into better representation of electorate itself?

Up to now, the plurality formula discouraged individual candidates from running under the banner of a party. To be able to cover as wider electoral base as possible, candidates preferred not to affiliate themselves with any party, or even hide it, if they happen to belong to any. This applies to all parties with the exception of CPRF. However, as the last electoral cycle shows, even communist candidates, while relying principally on their own electorate, were willing to run as extra-partisan candidates, representing all leftist movements. Gubernators often backed influential local candidates by creating formal blocks or informal ‘lists’, in the expectation of forming a loyal legislative body, or at least a sizeable deputy group in it. Therefore for pro-governor candidates there were even less incentives to be member of any federal party and publicly claim it. They faced a choice: either appeal to a greater electoral base and use the administrative resources, associated with the close link to the governor (unrestricted access to mass media, subsidisation of campaign, etc.) and win, or promote the federal brand, counting on its fate, and lose.

Contrary to common electoral practices, the candidates nominated by parties rarely had a long membership in that party. This was partially because of the short life-span of the parties themselves, but also the wide-spread practice when during electoral campaigns parties sought important political figures to be supported by. In fact, some parties, failing to gain a desired politician into their membership, and even failing to receive consent to be informally supported by him or her, announced their ‘support’ of the candidate in question, which sometimes came at a surprise on the candidate himself or herself.

Table 2 in the Appendix shows that party participation in the majority of regional legislative elections was lower than party representation in the already working assemblies, after elections (columns three and four). This phenomenon can be explained by several factors. Some regions demonstrated astonishing increase in the partisanship of the regional legislatures: from zero to 100% in Magadan oblast, from zero to 67% in Kalmykia, from 3% to 72% in Kabardino-Balkaria, and similar figures can be detected in Tatarsta, Chukotskyi, Khanty-Mansiiskyi and Evenkiiskii AOs. Almost all of the regions where this pattern was observed belong to the category of the autocratic, or semi-autocratic regimes; party participation can be explained by clan and corporatist interests, rather than indicating the strength of the party in the region or reflecting mass attitudes.

Other explanations refer to the technical requirements of an electoral procedure that practically benefit independent candidates. For example, it is advantageous to choose a district later, close to the end of a registration period, when a fairly accurate forecast can be made of the chances of individual candidates in different districts, and change the district of nomination where this is advisable. For a party candidate to change the district is extremely difficult as it involves calling for a conference and other related steps. For the same reason the party nomination itself can be a very costly and tedious procedure in territorially large regions (Taimyrskii AO, Khanty-Mansiiskii AO, Chukotskii AO, Yamalo-Nenetskii AO, Magadanskaya oblast’). The third procedural explanation involves the factor of the timing of the election, and the requirement of the one-year waiting period after (re)registration that has to pass before a party becomes eligible to participate in elections. After the new law on political parties was implemented, many parties went through a re-registration procedure, which explains a pause before they became eligible to nominate candidates (in Komi, Bashkiria, Udmurtia). Therefore some candidates, though being in fact partisan, ran as independents, but identified their party affiliation and formed factions when elected into an assembly.

The other effect of the change in electoral formula that will be discussed in this paper is voter turnout. Political scientists agree on the argument that PR systems are more conducive to political participation than plurality systems. As Lijphart found, “turnout boost from PR is somewhere between nine and twelve percent” (1997, 7). How this applies to the Russian case, the next elections will show, but one can speculate on the issue, drawing on the empirical evidence. The basic logic under the causal link between PR and higher turnout is quite simple: plurality and majority systems, which produce large disproportions between votes and seats, de-motivate some voters, especially of weak parties or minority movements, from turning out, since they believe that their vote will make no difference. Small parties themselves are discouraged from making an effort, which leads to fewer parties in a ballot, and consequently, less choice for voters. This limitation on the number of parties further discourages voter participation. In the Russian case, with highly personalised electoral politics, the shift to a PR system will perhaps not have a noticeable effect on voter turnout. Only in the long run, when substantially greater shares of the electorate will find their party affiliation, voter turnout increase can be expected.

As the Table 3 below demonstrates, the list PR system does correlate with the share of party candidates, but this does not explain whether it is the PR system that encourages the formation of parties, or rather that other forces, such as intra-elite competition, cause the party formation and the PR system is then adopted as the most suitable for the party consensus. As Golosov and Gelman note, the participation of parties depends on the level of competition, both to the regional legislature and to the incumbent governor. Political elites in the three regions (Krasnoyarsk, Kaliningrad and Sverdlovs) ‘apparently sought to achieve certain political goals by electoral system reform’ (1999, 212). Parties in these regions were used as instruments of elite competition and become relatively strong and well organised. Unlike in the other regions that abandoned the PR system after the first try (Marii El, Tyva and Saratov oblast’ in the first electoral circle, Ust-Ordynskoe and Korayk AO in the second (See table 2 in Appendix), in these regions PR electoral formula proved to be sustainable.

If we compare the level of party participation in legislature elections with the instability of the legislature  (See Table 2), we observe that parties are more likely to nominate a candidate if there was a chance of changing the existing balance of power in the regional assembly. Bivariate correlation analysis shows a significant (0.495) correlation between party participation in an election and a change in the composition of legislature. This finding supports Moser’s argument that the ‘regional political landscape itself plays more a role in variation in party candidate nomination than the electoral system used’ (2003, 37).

    Table 2. Correlation Between Party Representation in Regional Legislatures (Part2, Part3, Repres), Stability of Regional Legislatures, and Electoral Formula

          PART3    REPRES    FORMULA    PART2    CHANGE
PART3    Pearson Correlation    1    .148    .154    .521(**)    .495(**)
     Sig. (2-tailed)    .    .168    .151    .000    .000
     N    88    88    88    85    88
REPRES    Pearson Correlation    .148    1    .130    .083    .065
     Sig. (2-tailed)    .168    .    .229    .449    .545
     N    88    88    88    85    88
FORMULA    Pearson Correlation    .154    .130    1    .129    .314(**)
     Sig. (2-tailed)    .151    .229    .    .238    .003
     N    88    88    88    85    88
PART2    Pearson Correlation    .521(**)    .083    .129    1    .370(**)
     Sig. (2-tailed)    .000    .449    .238    .    .000
     N    85    85    85    85    85
CHANGE    Pearson Correlation    .495(**)    .065    .314(**)    .370(**)    1
     Sig. (2-tailed)    .000    .545    .003    .000    .
     N    88    88    88    85    88
**  Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

PART2 - share of party nominees in regional legislatures in the second electoral cycle
PART3 - share of party nominees in regional legislatures in the third electoral cycle
REPRES – share of partisan deputies in regional legislatures in the third electoral cycle
FORMULA – electoral formula indicator (1-5 –for plurality and majority formula, according to the district magnitude, and 7 – for mix formula)
CHANGE – estimate for the legislative change, a sum of squares of percentage change in each faction between second and third elections

The reasons of the support of the Central Electoral Commission on the introduction of the new regulation were: firstly, to buttress the party system by forcing parties to diversify, and to centralise control over the regions. The latter can be done, as envisaged, via the factions of United Russia (UR) in regional legislature. By the end of 2003, with only four regions using the mix electoral system, seventy-eight regions have at least one deputy in their legislative corpus, and forty-seven have factions of the party of power. Quite possibly, the UR penetration into regions will even be intensified by PR formula. Secondly, CEC believed that PR list system would give parties incentives to participate in regional elections and give party factions a more institutionalised role in the regional political system. Even though parties did have intensive internal lives, they refrained from participation in state politics (Moser, 2003, 39). The introduction of the PR rule will promote parties’ penetration not only in space, to larger number of territories, but also in depth, enabling them to play more active role in power politics.

Since regional parties are barred from the opportunity of running for seats in the legislature, they will be forced to transform themselves into the regional offices of the federal parties, or form electoral blocks with the existing regional offices. The fate of the existing branches of federal parties is two-fold: either they will strengthen, transforming themselves into political organisations with consistent platforms and deep societal roots, or they will be bought out by the local powerful elites. In conditions of modest financial support from the centre, many regional offices will be tempted into self-financing with the help of willing local partners. The demand for this political resource will instigate the diffusion of the national parties, making one party brand include diverse political formations in different regions.

The reform assumes a level playing field for political parties to compete for seats in regional assemblies. The institutionalisation of the national political parties in regional assemblies together with the underdevelopment of parties on grass-roots level is likely to bring results deviant from those envisaged. Since only national political parties will be legally authorised to compete for seats, and given the low public participation in party politics in general, and even lower in the case of federal parties, the field will be open to manipulations and other informal practices. As the evidence of the first seven elections held after the electoral reform in December 2003 shows, many of the regional offices of the federal parties were intensively infused by the economic and political elite, to the extent where these structures were bought out for their political objectives. In this case party branches in regions become mere PR-institutions, lacking any political ideology, as happened with the SPS and LDPR in several regions. Moreover, the parties can be registered and their jurisdictional registration sold out to individual regions, where they are used for the formation of blocks, as happened with the Block “Communists” in Ulyanovsk oblast. Some of the regionally founded parties transformed themselves into branches of the national parties in regions, such as the Party of Peace in Ingushetia, led by the popular leader Ruslan Aushev.


The introduction of the PR system is intended to promote competitiveness in the regional political arena. There are serious reasons to predict, however, that in the short run the introduction of the PR list system will bolster formal party activities, creating sham party branches existing only on paper, rather than society-based strengthening of the party system from the grass-roots level. The problem of too high personalisation of the parties creates a further obstacle to the formation of branches of federal parties and their performance. In many regions the fight to control federal party branches is a struggle between local elites, in others, regional branches are relatively marginalised. It is logical to expect that in this latter case powerful elite groups will try to colonise party regional offices, particularly those that are not strongly institutionalised . Evidence from Komi republic illustrates this argument: the regional branch of the SPS party was invaded by the employees of one local FPG and later the leadership was taken over by the oligarchic top management of the FPG ; their leaders hardly ever belong to the regional elite, and the prospective of their election into the regional assemblies seems nonsensical for both political elite and electorate . Even though the prospect of ‘hostile take over’ of the branches of main federal parties by a serious regional elites is a sub-optimal solution, it still a more favourable outcome than the inhabitation of the legislature by political marginals and adventurers, downgrading the credibility of the legislatures.


In spite of the rather dim prospects for better representation of ‘interests and viewpoints of the electorate’, the list PR system can, however, help parties to take roots in the societal milieu. The introduction of PR may have an effect on the partisan structure in the individual regions, in that it will discourage the convergence of parties (Katz, 1980, 121). Under PR, party leaders will be more willing to shape ideological platforms than they are now, and this will inevitably involve differentiating them from the platforms of other parties.  In this respect, the introduction of PR may encourage parties to take real roots in the society, since the move to take a sound ideological position will lead parties to seek support from a distinct societal group and better represent societal cleavages.


4. Preliminary thoughts on the effects of electoral systems on accountability

Accountability is a broad concept that encompasses several aspects: monitoring, auditing, oversight, control and punishment (Schleider 1999). Governments must be subject to oversight from below. In the scholarly literature this control mechanism is conceptualised as vertical accountability: strengthening the ties between the regional government and its constituents by increasing its transparency and empowering the capacity of citizens to influence policy decisions. Citizens must be able to oversee and restrain the political process in regional governments in virtually every stage of the policy decision-making and implementation processes, assess the outcome of the policy decisions and if needed, impose sanctions on the accountable party. In order to advance this form of accountability, a strong network of binds connecting the government to the general public has to be established. Seemingly, this strategy is more feasible in increasing both answerability and enforcement dimensions of accountability  in nascent democracies.

Is there a causal relationship between electoral system and political accountability? Dominant political theories point out that the plurality rule is more inductive for vertical accountability (Powell, 1982, Blais and Dion, 1990, Persson, Tabellini and Trebbi, 2001), since a plurality system tends to produce a one-party majority government. One of the merits of one-party government is its greater decisiveness, and unambiguous effects the decisions it makes on the fate of the party in power. This type of government holds its responsibility for the policy decisions primarily to the electorate: if the party loses support of the voter, it loses office as an outcome of the next elections. While in coalition governments, which are likely to be a result of the PR formula, ‘the fate of the party in a coalition has more to do with internal dynamic of that coalition than with the party’s electoral fortune’ (Blais, 1991, 242). According to Irvine, ‘plurality systems make it easier for the voter to bring about a qualitative change in the way he is governed’ (1979, 25). In the Russian case, the plurality formula does frequently produce a one-party legislature, or the prototype of it. It is questionable though whether a one-party legislature is more accountable than multi-party one, since the electoral fate of both often depends on sources independent from public support.

Under conditions of extreme party underdevelopment, however, another hypothesis can be valid. As demonstrated by Moser (1999), in constraining the number of parties and providing political stability, proportional representation may be more successful than the plurality system. The fragmented character and low institutionalisation of the Russian party system provide grounds for a hypothesis that runs counter to the aforementioned conventional wisdom: list PR can be more inductive for accountability.

Yet another explanation draw on the assumption that electoral rules vary in their monitoring capacity and therefore create stronger or weaker constraints on elected officials (Rose-Ackerman, 2001). It is assumed that in candidate-centred systems, contrary to party-centred systems, politicians are more directly accountable to voters; consequently, the plurality rule makes elections a better monitoring device to hold politicians accountable. Under the plurality system, candidates are elected by geographical constituency, which makes them accountable to a distinct constituency, while under proportional representation individual politicians are first accountable to the party. Further, if we distinguish between multi-and single-member districts, the latter provide closer ties between representatives and constituents, and hence greater accountability, in contrast to the situation in multimember districts, where responsibility for defending voters’ interests is shared among many MPs.

Satisfactory levels of accountability can be achieved if elections serve as a mechanism which makes candidates send reliable signals of their policy preferences and their level of competence and honesty during the campaign: this information is made available to the voters, and they pay attention to these signals when they vote; the winner implements the announced policies and act in consistency with signalled personality traits after election  (Stokes, 2003). Notably, none of these rules are formal, therefore, responsiveness through elections relies both on formal and informal rules. The evidence from Russia demonstrates that none of the three types of informal mechanisms is in place. The policy preferences aired by politicians look basically similar, routinely pledging social support for citizens and economic welfare for the regions, however, these signals including the information on the personal traits of the candidates are by no means reliable. The voters pay little attention to those signals on account both of their unreliability and on the grounded expectations that politicians care less about holding office than seeking rents. Finally, once elected, politicians rarely commit themselves to the announced policies, since their expectations of re-election are based less on winning popular support via responsive performance than on manipulation of the mass vote through informal mechanisms made available by link to the concrete powerful elite group, gubernator, or Moscow connections. Bearing in mind the growing importance of these informal institutions to regional electoral and party politics, I will elaborate on them at some length below.

Via the performance of the informal institutions, the effect of the formal ones was either reinforced, weakened, or in many cases led to effects opposite to those envisaged. These practices can be framed within the concept of “competing” informal institutions (Hemke and Levitsky, 2003), co-existing with weak formal institutions and entailing incompatibility between the actor’s goals and the expectations of the outcomes generated by the formal institutions. Competing informal institutions “structure actors’ incentives in ways that are incompatible with the formal rules” (Hemke and Levitsky, 2003, 19), a feature that corresponds to the ‘dysfunctional’ characteristisation of informal institutions in the studies of scholars such as O’Donnell, Hartlyn and Collins.

Russian electoral practices are frequently portrayed as being corroded by vote rigging, campaign irregularities, violence against candidates and other forms of cheating and scandals (McFaul, 2000, Gelman, Golosov, Meleshkina, 2001). To give just one example, in Ingushetia in 2003 elections to regional legislative assembly there were counted 11% more votes than there were eligible voters .

If we assume that citizens can induce accountability and responsiveness via an election mechanism, that mechanism has to excel in choosing representatives whose policy preferences are the same as their constituents’ (Miller and Stokes, 1966). As the observations demonstrated, elections in Russian context are increasingly unable to serve their primary function of being a selection device of the people’s representatives. The proliferation of competing informal electoral practices partially invalidates the causal relationship between electoral systems and vertical accountability. Perhaps, instead, societal factors have better likelihood of explaining their emergence and preservation. Putnam’s theory of civicness, for example, focuses on informal institutions of personal trust, associational life, and hence greater supplies of social capital that induce more accountable, decisive, responsive and effective governmental performance (Putnam, 1993).  Other scholars argue that a society characterised by social equality has better chances to promote informal background for the development of local democracy (Boix, 2003, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2003, Stokes, 2003). Indeed, as Stokes points out, ‘the community that is not socially polarised would also be one in which people would be relatively ready to expect that the actions of others (relatively poor to relatively wealthy, and vice versa) will be appropriate in sustaining democratic accountability’(2003, 15).

To apply these findings in our context, one can discern that electoral formulae have little impact on the mechanisms of vertical accountability, nevertheless analysis can reveal whether and in what way electoral formula influence horizontal accountability , or more precisely, whether and how a PR system can shift the balance between executive and legislative branches in the direction of curbing ‘bad’ informal practices. It is believed that, for governors, PR elections are more difficult to manipulate  (Moser, 2003, 39), and that the introduction of this system will dilute the concentration of pro-governmental allies in regional assemblies, leading to a shift in allegiance from being predominantly rested on regional elite to the federal, or extra-regional party organisations. This creates a centres of power independent from the regional executives and reinforces the legislative check on the governors and its administration, constraining arbitrary use of the administrative resources, curbing the scope of informal procedures of corruption and clientelism.


Conclusion

When democracy works well, this is because the formal institutions are supported and supplemented by informal procedures and conventions. The effects of formal institutions such as election formulae on the democratic performance of the regional governments are conditional on complementary informal institutions they induce or competing ones they restrict. To fully understand these institutions, further empirical research into the precise electoral mechanisms which determine horizontal accountability between the branches of regional governments is required.


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