Explaining Party Support in the 2016 Russian State Duma Election

What is it about?

Even though Russian elections have in recent years been fairly predictable, political and social factors still underpin the motivations for people’s voting behavior. The article analyzes voting behavior in the 2016 State Duma election, using a postelection, nationally representative survey to assess the differences between the four parliamentary parties’ support bases. It finds that voting decisions in the 2016 election were strongly related to voters’ attitudes to the national president, Vladimir Putin, as well as to their attitudes to corruption and the economic situation. Voters who were more positive to the president and viewed the economic crisis more benignly were more likely to vote for the ‘party of power’, United Russia. Moreover, the four parties’ electorates had distinctive social profiles that were consistent with long-term patterns established in previous State Duma elections.

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Why is it important?

Many recent studies of Russian elections have paid relatively little attention to the election results themselves, and instead focused more attention on the integrity of the electoral process. A perception has grown among international observers, as well as many Russian citizens, that election results simply reflect the success with which the regime can mobilize voters. Such a perspective suggests that the choices of voters themselves play only a minimal role in the electoral outcome. In this article, we argue that this approach misses the fact that the election results are still determined by the summation of ballot papers - so how people actually vote, and what motivates them to do so, should be as much of interest in Russia as in any other state.