For a considerable part of the political opposition in Russia, elections have been something to be watched from the sidelines. While opposition candidates are formally blocked for legal-administrative reasons, they have repeatedly claimed that registration refusals are politically motivated and that election committees apply the law differently depending on the candidates’ political affiliation. By analyzing the perceptions of double standards as well as actual enforcement practice and structural incentives, this article identifies the core mechanics of this quasi-legal mechanism of political pre-election filtering in Russian elections.
Håvard Bækken, Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, reviews Putin’s Russia and the Falsification of History: Reasserting Control over the Past, by Anton Weiss-Wendt (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.