Disproportionality by Proportional Design: Seats and Votes in Russia's Regional Legislative Elections, December 2003–March 2005

From a normative perspective, one of the major merits of electoral systems involving proportional representation (PR) is that they entail high levels of correspondence between voters' preferences, as expressed at the polls, and the levels of representation attained by political parties. From December 2003, federal law made it imperative to use mixed electoral systems in Russia's regional legislative elections. Thus PR, previously used in only a few regions, emerged as a principal mechanism of representation at the sub-national level of the Russian polity. The political incentives that drove this sweeping reform had little to do with normative considerations. When bringing mixed electoral systems to the regions, the federal centre apparently sought to open up the regional political arenas to national political influences, which could be achieved by introducing national political parties as important actors in regional elections. 11See Grigorii V. Golosov (2004) Political Parties in the Regions of Russia: Democracy Unclaimed (Boulder, Lynne Rienner), pp. 260–268. However, one might expect that even if without clear intent, high proportionality of electoral outcomes could have emerged as a side product of the electoral reform. It did not. Instead, the conversion of votes into seats in Russia's regional elections produced persistently disproportional outcomes that greatly favoured some political forces at the expense of others. The goal of this study is to examine this idiosyncratic tendency and to build an explanatory model incorporating both institutional and political determinants of disproportionality. By its methodological design, the study is based primarily on a statistical analysis of aggregate electoral results.