‘Mobilized voting’ versus ‘performance voting’ in electoral autocracies: Territorial variations in the levels of support for the systemic opposition parties in Russian municipalities

Abstract

The main task of authoritarian elections is to guarantee the survival of the regime. Achieving this goal, authoritarian rulers rely on authoritarian electoral mobilization that is employed by political machines, targeted mostly on poor and dependent voters. At the same time, since electoral autocracies permit opposition parties, those voters, who avoid mobilization, are able to make a choice between the government and the opposition. If they are dissatisfied by their personal or social conditions, they are liable to engage in 'performance voting' and give their support to the opposition. In this article, we examine how the two logics of 'mobilized voting' and 'performance voting' relate to each other. The study is based on a large-N analysis of local level variations in the electoral support of Russia's three systemic opposition parties in 2016 Duma elections, and a unique dataset comprised of electoral and social-economic data, from local (municipal) units.

Pragmatism and protest: Russia’s communist party through Covid-19 and beyond

“…There are, however, recognisable differences between the policy positions and voter perceptions of systemic opposition parties. Compared with the others, the CPRF is less likely to tone down its criticism, and less likely to submit to co-option through patronage than other systemic oppositions parties (Dollbaum 2017;Panov and Ross 2023).…”

“…Systemic opposition parties can be advantageous to electoral authoritarian stabilisation (Semenov 2017), giving flexibility in ballot management, and additional electoral legitimacy to regimes (Smyth and Turovsky 2018). They can also play a real, if limited, role in providing "early warnings" to the regime: voters are still relatively more likely to vote for opposition parties in regions where they perceive the governing party to be failing (Panov and Ross 2023).…”

Between Loyalty and Opposition

“…In Russia, although the three parties of the loyal opposition are generally considered to be effectively controlled by the Kremlin, the KPRF is the only party that falls in the category of programmatic parties, even if not completely devoid of charismatic and clientelistic elements, while the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and Just Russia (JR) are both examples of a charismatic and clientelistic linkage. This makes the voters' perception of these parties different (Panov and Ross, 2021) and affects the position of the parties within the system. Some recent studies show how the KPRF is not only the most likely to engage in street activism and protests but is also the party with the most autonomous network of activists at the sub-national level (Dollbaum, 2017).…”