Volume 9 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2000

Feature

Putin's Russia
     How Floating Parties Frustrate Democratic Accountability:
     A Supply-Side View of Russia's Elections
     Richard Rose

The liberal theory of democracy is demand-driven: voters decide what they want, and politicians compete to supply their demands. However, a realist theory is that the government reflects what elites choose to supply. This was very obvious in the "Adam and Eve" era of Soviet elections when, as the story had it, God presented Eve to Adam and told him that this was the woman of his choice. Of course, supply-side influences can be found in every democ-racy, for elites write the election laws and take the initiative in organizing political parties-but these influ-ences are peculiarly strong in the Russian Federation. (See, in this regard, Michael McFaul, "Institutional Design, Uncertainty and Path Dependency during Transitions: Cases from Russia," Constitutional Political Economy 10, no. 1 [1999], pp. 27-52).

The erratic and changing supply of parties in Russian elections has often worked against the possi-bility of holding elected leaders accountable; people cannot vote for a party that is not there. Nor can people vote against a party that has dissolved itself rather than give an account of its actions at the end of its term of office. Even though the Russian ballot gives the electorate the default choice of voting against all candidates, doing so is not an expression of a positive preference. Even though Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have favored some parties over others, neither has founded a party to mobilize support for members of parliament, as General de Gaulle did, let alone allowed themselves to be chosen by a party caucus that can hold them accountable, as is the case in Scandinavian and German parties. The party of the Kremlin is no more and no less than the party of power.

Supply and demand considerations are combined by Joseph Schumpeter into an elitist theory of democ-racy, where oligopolistic elites supply voters with parties among which they can choose. In its simplest form, the theory may be reduced to a duopolistic choice between the Governing Party and the Opposition. At an election, voters can vote for the In party, thus allowing the government of the day to remain in office or vote to turn the In party out, and put the Out party in. This was the choice offered in the second round of the 1996 Russian presidential election, when Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov were the alternatives. In a proportional representation parliamentary system, voters may have a wider choice of parties, but decisions about who gets what in a coalition government emerge from interparty bargaining among the respective elites.

To say that voters are free to decide who to vote for is meaningful, as Schumpeter noted, only in the sense that "everyone is free to start another textile mill" (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 4th ed., [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952]). In Russia, the deposit fee required for an individual to contest a single-member district is 1,000 times the minimum monthly wage, and for a party to qualify for the proportional representation list, it is 200,000 signatures or 25,000 times the minimum monthly wage. For the presidency, more signatures are required for a place on the ballot, costing upward of $1,000,000 to collect. In each instance, the costs of campaigning, including fighting legal and other actions launched by oppo-nents, raise the financial threshold still higher.

In an established democracy, most of the expense of supplying parties and candidates represents an invest-ment long since made. Major parties have existed for a half century or longer. Presidential candidates have usually devoted much of their adult life to politics, much of it in preparation for running for the nation's top political job. In the past decade, Russia has had three presidential elections and three for the Duma, but the supply of political parties has been erratic. This has not been due to a lack of political experience, for politicians as diverse as Boris Yeltsin, Yegor Gaidar, Gennady Zyuganov, and Vladimir Putin each served an apprenticeship in an extremely disciplined party orga-nization, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding this, elites have shown too much skill in forming, breaking, and avoiding parties. While their actions may be explained in terms of self-interested rational-choice theories, the systemic consequences of their actions are counterproductive; the resulting free-floating party system destroys-or precludes-the central institutions necessary to create a representative and accountable democracy. (See, here, Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999], pp.1ff.) The supply of parties in the Duma The theory of parliamentary representation is that indi-viduals vote for parties that best reflect their political outlook, whether pro- or antimarket, Slavophile or Western. This presupposes that most Russians identify with a set of political principles or ideology. But many still do not. When the eighth New Russia Barometer survey asked a nationwide sample of citizens what broad political outlook they most favored, 35 percent replied "none." The second largest group, 24 percent, identified with communist principles; 18 percent endorsed a market economy; 8 percent, social democracy; 7 percent, a great-power patriotic party; 5 percent, envi-ronmentalism; and the rest named other outlooks. (Opinion data comes from New Russia Barometer VIII, a nationwide representative-sample survey conducted by VCIOM on behalf of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, inter-viewing 1,940 persons, January 13-29, 2000.) With 26 parties on the Duma ballot in 1999, Russians had a plenitude of parties from which to choose. Some parties espoused a more or less clear polit-ical outlook, such as the Communist Party, the promarket Right Forces group, or the Zhirinovsky Bloc. Others, such as the Unity and Fatherland parties, were fuzzy-focus parties that claimed to represent everyone. In the event, many of the parties represented almost no one. For example, the Party of Women won the support of less than four percent of Russian women. The supply-side initiatives of political elites are the primary cause of Duma seats changing hands. Just as mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street are driven by the ambitions and rewards available to financial elites, so shifts in representation within the Duma reflect initiatives by political elites. There is a big turnover in the number of parties on the ballot from one election to the next. In the 1993 Duma election, there were 13 parties on the proportional representa-tion ballot; in 1995, there were 43; and in 1999, the number was down to 26. (For details of results and voting behavior in previous Russian elections, see Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes [Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1997].) In a new democracy, party formation invari-ably involves a certain amount of trial and error, but in Russia party turnover has been so abnormal that it has become an obstacle to accountable government. A necessary condition for voters to be able to hold politi-cians accountable is that the parties remain in business from one election to the next. If each election offers voters new choices, they have no basis for evaluating the past record and credibility of competing parties, or for rewarding or punishing parties on the basis of that past record.

When the deadline for the registration of polit-ical parties fell a year in advance of the 1999 Duma election, more than three hundred groups met regis-tration requirements. At that time, the front-running party was Fatherland, the product of an alliance between Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his allies in the regions; it challenged the hold of Yeltsin and his entourage on the Kremlin. In reaction, those who had served Yeltsin, including Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, began organizing groups that merged to become the Union of Right Forces. At the end of the summer, after Vladimir Putin had become prime minister, another pro-Kremlin party, Unity (also known as Medved), was formed.

In the Duma election of 1999, more than three-fifths of the vote in the proportional representation (PR) ballot was won by parties that had not contested the election four years earlier. The big winners were parties newly supplied by political elites to meet the demands of a post-Yeltsin market. The Unity party came in a close second to the Communist Party in the national PR ballot, and the ostensibly liberal Right Forces party was fourth; the anti-Yeltsin Fatherland party also did well. Duma seats were won by three parties that had won seats in the previous election- the Communists, Yabloko, as well as the Zhirinovsky Bloc, which was technically a new party but was offering the same old stuff as before. The Agrarians did not contest PR seats and Our Home is Russia, no longer the party of power, failed to win any seats. Half the Duma seats are single-member districts. Whereas proportional representation requires politi-cians to compete on the basis of a party list, the single-member system encourages a supply of candi-dates representing local interests rather than parties. The winner is the person with the most positive votes, so long as the total is greater than the number of votes cast against all candidates (the default option printed on Russian ballots), and turnout is at least 25 percent. In the 1999 Duma election, the best-organized party, the Communists, contested almost two-thirds of the single-member districts, and two other parties, Yabloko and the right-wing Spiritual Heritage group, contested half the seats. The two parties closest to Vladimir Putin demonstrated that they were the party of power in Moscow by minimizing the number of seats contested nationwide. Unity nominated candi-dates in only one-sixth of the single-member districts, and Right Forces in less than a third of these seats. With an average of 10 candidates in each single-member district, some seats were won by candidates with less than a sixth of the popular vote. The median winner secured the endorsement of only 30 percent of the district's voters. Independents constituted the most successful category in contesting single-member districts, winning almost half the seats allocated last December.

Whereas an established democracy has floating voters, in Russia there is a floating party system. Between one Duma election and the next, major as well as minor parties may appear and disappear suddenly (Table 1). In 1993, eight parties won PR seats. The Liberal Democrats, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was first in the popular vote, followed by Yegor Gaidar's Russia's Choice, then perceived as the party of power; the Communists came in third. In the 1995 election, seven of the eight major parties again appeared on the ballot; this gave their original supporters a chance to vote for or against them. In aggregate, about half the voters abandoned the parties they had supported two years earlier. (The gross number of voters abandoning their 1993 party was substantially higher, since the aggregate figures are net totals that cancel out individuals moving in opposite directions between parties.) In 1995, only four parties cleared the PR threshold (5 percent), including one new party, Our Home is Russia; it was, at that time, the party of power, led by the then-prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. In 1999, four parties, which had previously won PR seats in the Duma, did not contest the election, while newly invented parties won the most seats.

An election fixes the supply of Duma members, but not necessarily the parties to which they belong (Figure 1). This is determined by politics within the Koltsevaya Doroga (Moscow Beltway). Once they have arrived in Moscow, Duma members elected as inde-pendents from single-member districts either come out in their true colors, as partisans, or join so-called convenience parties, offering office facilities and committee assignments to their nominal members. Three parties, which represent almost a third of the Duma's seats-People's Deputies, Russian Regions, and the Agro-Industrial bloc-are convenience parties that did not contest elections last December. Some Table 1: Russia's Appearing and Disappearing Parties 1993 1995 1999 Contesting three elections (51.3) (45.0) (38.2) Communist 12.4 22.3 24.3 Liberal Dem./Zhirinovsky 22.9 11.2 6.0 Yabloko 7.9 6.9 5.9 Women of Russia 8.1 4.6 2.0 Contesting two elections (30.3) (18.2) (1.2) Russia's Choice 15.5 3.9 n.a. Agrarian 8.0 3.8 n.a. Russian Unity & Concord 6.8 0.4 n.a. Our Home Is Russia n.a. 10.1 1.2 Contesting one election (18.4) (36.8) (62.6) Democratic Party of Russia 5.5 n.a. n.a. Unity (Medved) n.a. n.a. 23.3 Fatherland n.a. n.a. 13.3 Union of Right Forces n.a. n.a. 8.5 Others 12.9 36.8 17.5 Sources: Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham House, 1997), and www.RussiaVotes.org. Communist deputies also joined these new conve-nience parties in order to help them qualify as a Duma party. Fatherland immediately lost members as it become apparent that its future was less bright than that of the parties of power. The distribution of leadership positions in the new Duma further attenuated the link between the voters and their representatives. Initially, the Kremlin endorsed concentrating committee chairs in the hands of parties that, together, had won barely two-fifths of the Duma seats in December-the Communists and Unity, plus a convenience party, the People's Deputies. After this led to a walkout by parties expecting to share committee chairs in proportion to their electoral (or at least, their Duma) numbers, committee chairs were reassigned to all parties except Yabloko. However, committee chairs were not supplied in proportion to a party's popular vote or seats in the Duma. Whatever one makes of the Duma election, the losers are clear: they are the people who had hoped that the post-Yeltsin era would strengthen the development of representative and accountable government. While the Duma has been freely elected, its membership is not representative of public opinion in the way in which, for example, American members of Congress seek to be. The floating party system is thus an institu-tional obstacle to accountable government. Supplying a president The presidential election dramatically illustrates the importance of supply-side politics. As Boris Yeltsin's position deteriorated, the "family," that is, the complex of close relatives as well as political and economic leaders that had benefited from influence in the Kremlin, engaged in a frantic search for a candi-date who might win the 2000 election. The most visible politician, Boris Yeltsin, was enormously unpopular and could not run for reelection because he had already served two terms. While rumors circulated in Moscow that the "family" would suspend the elec- tion rather than risk defeat, Yeltsin was not in favor of such a high-risk strategy. In any event, his health made it very dangerous to assume he would live long enough to justify a seizure of power in his name. The roll call of might-have-been presidents is lengthy. Between 1995 and the summer of 1998 a succession of Yeltsin prime ministers had gained temporary visibility. However, the post was dangerous, for an unpopular prime minister could be dropped, while a popular prime minister threatened those closest to the ailing president. After years of dogged service, Viktor Chernomyrdin was dismissed in March 1998. His youthful successor, Sergei Kiriyenko, was dropped after the August 1998 collapse of the ruble. His more popular successor, Yevgeny Primakov, was abruptly fired in May 1999. And his nondescript successor, Sergei Stepashin, lasted only four months. The continuing unpopularity of Yeltsin and his entourage encouraged opposition to the "family" to crystallize around Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, who was not associated with the national government. In addition to controlling the substantial resources of Russia's largest city, Luzhkov was able to draw on support from the oblast governors who shared the Moscow mayor's desire to decentralize power. The result was the Fatherland party, which, in forming an alliance with Primakov in August 1999, had the potential for winning the presidency by drawing votes from both non-Communists wanting to clean out the Kremlin and Communists by now resigned to the unelectability of their candidate, Gennady Zyuganov. Public-opinion polls provided a market of sorts for evaluating the supply of potential presidential candidates. The standard practice of the polls was to offer a lengthy list of wannabes and has-beens as potential candidates for the office. A year before the ballot, the largest bloc of electors were "don't knows"; there was also a significant bloc of electors against all presidential candidates (Figure 2). Between January 1998 and July 1999, five different politicians gained the support of at least 10 percent of electors: Zyuganov, Primakov, Luzhkov, Alexander Lebed, and Grigory Yavlinsky. All were anti-Yeltsin candidates. The polls consistently indicated that the "family" had no candidate with a chance to make it to the second round of the presidential race, let alone win it. Figure 2: Presidential Front-Runners Before Second Chechen War Highest Percentage in Presidential-Preference Polls-

***

Communists
Unity
Fatherland
Right
Forces
Yabloko
Liberal Dem./ Zhirinovsky
People's Deputies
Russian Regions
Agro-Industrial
Minor Parties
Our Home is Russia
Independents Election Returns, 1999 Subsequent Duma Party Affiliation, January 2000
Figure 1: Changing Membership in the Duma
Sources: Central Electoral Commission (www.fci.ru);Duma (www.duma.gov.ru) 90 114 82 73 45 66 32 29 21 20 17 17 57 41 39 9 8 18 Source: VCIOM monthly surveys between January 1998 and July 1999 Don't Know Against All Zyuganov *Primakov Luzhkov Lebed Yavlinsky Zhirinovsky *Stepashin Yeltsin *Kiriyenko *Chernomyrdin 32 24 19 19 14 12 11 7 6 5 5 4 * *** Former Prime Minister.EAST EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW 58 A year ago Vladimir Putin did not exist as a polit-ical figure, let alone as a presidential candidate. Then late last summer, two events transformed the presiden-tial race. Yeltsin supplied a new face for the contest, naming the unknown Putin as prime minister. In the sense in which talented athletes are unexpectedly discovered, this ex-KGB agent was not a "discovery." It would be more apt to say that he was an "invention"- supplied as an answer to the need of the Yeltsin entourage for a viable and secure presidential candidate. A prime minister was ex officio a potential pres-idential candidate. But this does not make the incumbent a likely winner. The best showing of a prime minister in the opinion polls was the 15 percent support level given Primakov just before he was sacked. In VCIOM's August 1999 poll, only 2 percent favored Putin for president. This put him tenth in a list of ten potential candidates. Furthermore, all the front-runners-Zyuganov, Primakov, Luzhkov, Lebed, and Yavlinsky-were opponents of the "family." The following month Putin's support rose to 4 percent, but this still left him far behind four anti-Kremlin candidates. The bombs that killed hundreds of Moscow residents a few weeks after Putin entered office added a new dimension to Russian politics. Whatever the source of the bombs-and there is far more specula-tion about the source than there is hard evidence-the destruction was blamed on the Chechens. After attacks on neighboring Dagestan by Chechen-based militants, the second Chechen war was launched with a strategy of saturation bombing Figure 3: The Rise of Vladimir Putin Percentage of Votes if Elections Were Held Immediately *** Putin Yavlinsky Luzhkov Primakov Zyuganov 58 58 48 42 26 4 2 4 3 4 4 5 7 9 9 1 2 5 10 9 7 8 10 15 19 18 August 1999 September October November December January 2000 February 18 18 19 21 27 26 16 Source: VCIOM representative-sample surveys: monthly figures from October 1999 average the results of two or more polls taken within the month. See also www.RussiaVotes.org. *** that showed the Ministry of Defense had learned its lessons from Russia's ground losses in the first Chechen war, and also from the Pentagon's strategy in the war in Kosovo. Whatever their hesitations about volunteering to fight in Chechnya or the long-term consequences of the renewed war, a large majority of Russians endorsed the immediate successes brought by military action. (For details of public opinion, see the trend tables of VCIOM data, available at www.RussiaVotes.org.) Public opinion supported Putin in a popular war against a very unpopular enemy, the Chechens. By October 1999, VCIOM showed Putin the preferred presidential choice of 26 percent of Russians. As the war progressed, his support reached the unprecedented level of 42 percent, before the Duma vote, and passed the 58 percent mark at the beginning of January (Figure 3). Concurrently, the sentiments stirred by the second Chechen war reduced Zyuganov's support by a third. Even more important, it cut the ground from under Fatherland's potential candidates for the presi-dency, Primakov and Luzhkov. Whereas in August 1999, together, they had claimed ten times the level of Putin's support, by January 2000 that had dropped to one-sixth of the support for Putin. The supply of candidates shrank as Putin's fortunes rose. By giving his blessing to two noncom-munist parties before the Duma election, Putin cultivated a broader base of support; this also prevented the Fatherland party from seeming the primary anti-communist party. By the time nominations for the presidency closed, the cost of organizing a nominating petition was no longer worth the reward of being an also-ran, while the benefits of getting on the Putin bandwagon were real. Primakov, Luzhkov, and Lebed, all of whom had run ahead of previous Yeltsin prime ministers, did not file nomination papers. When offi-cial nominations closed, only Zyuganov, Yavlinsky, and Zhirinovsky put themselves forward as candidates for Russians who wanted to oppose what Vladimir Putin represented without being so negative as to cast a default vote against everybody. The importance of supply-side influence was rammed home on December 31, 1999, when a new president was supplied by an act of the Yeltsin entourage rather than by election or an act of God. Yeltsin's resig-nation gave the "family" what they most demanded: amnesty for any and all acts committed by Yeltsin since the Russian Federation was launched on January 1, 1992. The blanket freedom from prosecution ensures Boris Yeltsin his permanent place in Russian history. On the other hand, Yeltsin's resignation supplied Vladimir Putin with what he needed most, the power of an incumbent (albeit acting) president at the start of an election campaign. This gave Putin the most desir-able position in the floating party system-the candidate of the party of power. Equally as important, Yeltsin's resignation provided a constitutional justifica-tion for moving the election date forward three months. The family's strategy worked. On March 26, Putin won the presidential election in the first round with 53.4 percent of the vote. Putin owes nothing to parties or Duma members; the only obligations he has are to the people who promoted him from obscurity. Of necessity, the Russian elections have produced a government that other countries must do business with. But in dealing with it, foreigners should recog-nize that it no more represents the free choice of the Russian people than the Lada car was the choice of Soviet consumers. (People who have lived in a Gosplan economy are accustomed to "choosing" what elites supply.) Moreover, the volatility of preelection support is a reminder that the winner's success is vulnerable to the dictum, "easy come, easy go." Putin's fuzzy-focus appeal drew support from many different sections of Russian society. The electorate has therefore given Putin an unclear mandate. This leaves Putin and his associates free to decide what policies to supply. Richard Rose initiated the New Russia Barometer in January 1992, in the first month of the Russian Federation's existence. He is coauthor, with Stephen White and Ian McAllister, of How Russia Votes (Chatham House, 1997). This paper draws on surveys in Russia, conducted by VCIOM in the pre-Duma campaign period, and on New Russia Barometer VIII, a survey conducted in January 2000, with the support of the British Economic & Social Research Council (see www.cspp.strath.ac.uk and www.RussiaVotes.org).

Professor Rose is director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde,Glasgow.

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