PARTIES VS. INDEPENDENTS: THE CASE OF RUSSIA’S 2003 ELECTIONS IN KRASNODAR AND RIAZAN HENRY E. HALE AND TIMOTHY J. COLTON The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research 2601 Fourth Avenue, Suite 310 Seattle, WA 98121 TITLE VIII PROGRAMProject Information* Principal Investigator: Henry E. Hale Council Grant Number: 818-g Date: May 23rd, 2007 Copyright Information Individual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). 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The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author. iiiii Executive Summary In this working paper, we aim to contribute to the small body of work that does take the question of party system development seriously, that does not simply ask “What kind of parties?” or “How strong the parties?” but “Why parties at all?” One of our innovations is to apply survey evidence to this question, most importantly by comparing how voters relate to party-nominated candidates and independents in the ways that the theoretical literature on parties would lead us to think is important in generating a party-dominated polity. We present here a first cut into the data, suggestive more than definitive. Specifically, patterns in two carefully chosen districts in the 2003 Duma elections suggest that party-nominated candidates indeed enjoy an advantage over nonparty candidates, but that this advantage is rather slight and is not present in all the areas that the comparative literature leads us to expect.PARTIES VERSUS INDEPENDENTS: THE CASE OF RUSSIA’S 2003 ELECTIONS IN KRASNODAR AND RIAZAN (A First Cut at New Data)1 Henry E. Hale George Washington University [email protected] and Timothy J. Colton Harvard University [email protected] Draft NCEEER Working Paper April 12, 2006 1 The research on which this paper is based was supported by a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) (under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State). It was also made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Funds from the U.S. Department of State Office of Research, and from the National Science Foundation (NSF) also supported work leading to this report. The statements made and views expressed within this text are solely the responsibility of the authors and not of the U.S. Government, the NCEEER, the NSF, or the Carnegie Corporation. The authors are grateful to all whose support made this project possible. 4How do political systems become party systems? The near ubiquity of parties in countries with competitive electoral systems tends to be taken for granted rather than rigorously explained. Russia’s difficulties developing a robust party system, however, call into question the wisdom of simply assuming that strong parties will develop over time so long as a place retains competitive elections. Russia remains a highly nonpartisan environment, with its most powerful official (the president) having never run for election or reelection as a party nominee and with many other major offices having little to do with parties. There has been no major change in these brute facts since competitive elections became the norm in Russia in the early 1990s. In this working paper, we aim to contribute to the small body of work that does take the question of party system development seriously, that does not simply ask “What kind of parties?” or “How strong the parties?” but “Why parties at all?” One of our innovations is to apply survey evidence to this question, most importantly by comparing how voters relate to party-nominated candidates and independents in the ways that the theoretical literature on parties would lead us to think is important in generating a party-dominated polity. We present here a first cut into the data, suggestive more than definitive. Specifically, patterns in two carefully chosen districts in the 2003 Duma elections suggest that party-nominated candidates indeed enjoy an advantage over nonparty candidates, but that this advantage is rather slight and is not present in all the areas that the comparative literature leads us to expect. How Do Political Systems Become Party Systems? A political party, building on Sartori (1976: 58-64) and Schattschneider (1970: 35-7), is here defined as an enduring association of people who identify themselves by a public label and are joined together under it for the primary purpose of winning control of the national 5government by means of presenting their own candidates in elections for public office on the basis of a common platform.2 When law stipulates that only parties can participate in a given set of elections, of course, we are justified in taking parties as givens. But most large countries with competitive elections, states as diverse as the United States, India, and contemporary Russia, do not mandate party monopolies in the polity. There, it is germane to wonder how, if at all, parties come to “close out” the political market. Societies without mandated party monopolies have typically experienced a phase of partial party penetration early in their democratic histories and passed