page 1page 2page 3page 4page 5page 6page 7page 8page 9page 10page 11page 12page 13page 14page 15page 16page 17page 18page 19page 20page 21page 22page 23page 24page 25page 26TITLE: IRREGULARITIES IN THE DECEMBER 1993 ELECTION RETURNSAUTHORS: MIKHAIL MYAGKOV, California Institute of TechnologyALEXANDR SOBYANIN, Lebedev Institute of Theoretical PhysicsTHE NATIONAL COUNCILFOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN RESEARCHTITLE VIII PROGRAM1755Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20036IONPROJECT INFORMATION:1CONTRACTOR:California Institute ofTechnologyPRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:Peter Ordeshook & D. Roderick KiewietCOUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER:810-05DATE:April 11, 1996COPYRIGHT INFORMATIONIndividual researchers retain the copyright on work products derived from research funded byCouncil Contract. The Council and the U.S. Government have the right to duplicate written reportsand other materials submitted under Council Contract and to distribute such copies within theCouncil and U.S. Government for their own use, and to draw upon such reports and materials fortheir own studies; but the Council and U.S. Government do not have the right to distribute, ormakesuch reports and materials available, outside the Council or U.S. Government without thewritten consent of the authors, except as may be required under the provisions of the Freedom ofInformation Act 5 U.S.C. 552, or other applicable law.The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract funds provided by the NationalCouncil for Soviet and East European Research, made available by the U. S. Department of State under TitleVIII (the Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). The analysis andinterpretations contained in the report are those of the author(s).IRREGULARITIES IN THE DECEMBER 1993 RUSSIANELECTION RETURNSMikhail MyagkovCalifornia Institute of TechnologyAlexandr SobyaninLebedev Institute of Theoretical PhysicsThe authors wish to thank all representatives of the Russia's Choice party who collected voting data.which are not officially available. We are indebted to Roderick Kiewiet and Peter Ordeshook for importantcomments and support. We also would like 1o acknowledge the financial support of the National Councilfor Soviet and East European Studies.IntroductionThe December 1993 Russian elections, which were held only two months after thedissolution of the Russian Congress of People Deputies. presented voters with fourdecisions:1.Election of an independent deputy to the State Duma (the lower chamber of thelegislature). One half of the Duma was to be formed on the basis of 225 single memberdistricts.2.A party list preferential vote. The other half of the Duma was to be elected in onenational district through a party list, proportional representation system with a five percentcutoff level.3.Choice of two candidates to the newly created upper legislative chamber, theFederation Council. Candidates to the Federation Council were running in 89 two-memberdistricts, and each voter could (but did not have to) cast two votes. The 89 districtscorresponded to the 89 subjects (regions) of the Russian Federation.4.Approval or disapproval of a draft of the new Russian constitution, backed by Yeltsin,which, if accepted. would provide the president with enormous power.The results of the election were very different from what had been expected. The majorsurprise was the distribution of votes across the party lists for election to the State Duma.All pre-election polls suggested that voters supported reforms and, therefore. thatRussia's Choice would win a plurality, if not a majority. of seats. Communists andagrarians did not appear to have significant support. and nationalists were below the fivepercent cutoff level (Shlapentokh 1995). Nevertheless. the final outcome gave a clearplurality to the Zhirinovsky's nationalist Liberal Democrats. Democrats (Russia's Choice)and Communists ended up close to each other in second and third place respectively.A number of hypotheses have been offered to explain the outcome . Some authors haveargued that polling techniques were poor. and that the results of public opinion polls cannot be trusted to reflect voter preferences (Shlapentokh 1995). Others look to the effectsof the electoral law, combined with the inability of democrats to form coalitions(Remington 1994). A third hypothesis is that massive election fraud exaggerated thedifference between the outcome and pre-election polls. The basis for such claims is thatelection results have not been officially published, and voting data. unofficially acquired byrepresentatives of the Russia's Choice. suggest various irregularities.I.A number of articles in Russian and foreign newspapers. motivated by "strange"election outcomes argue that an official investigation should be launched to assess theseallegations of fraud (Sobyanin 1994a, Sobyanin 1994b, Sobyanin and Sukhovolskii 1994,Salie 1994, Vizitovich 1994. Piatkovskii 19941. The influential newspaper "MK"(Moskovskii Komsomolets) called the elections "a brick fallen on the head of Russiandemocracy" (Sorokina 1994). Others argue that no fraud occurred since the CentralElection Commission approved the results of the elections, and that the issue of fraud isalegal question and that "no mathematical speculations may imply such suspicion"(Vedeneev and Lysenko 1994). The only official response to allegations of fraud from theoffice of presidential administration took the same line: ". .. those people [Sobyanin and hisgroup] used to analyze election results. then they started to implement some scientificmethods. I doubt that their methods are correct" (Filatov 1994).This paper investigates whether or not the hypothesis of massive fraud can be rejectedon the basis of available data. Specifically, we look at these presumed irregularities andask: do these irregularities imply election fraud. or can they be accounted for by otherfactors'? We should state at the outset that, given available data, it is virtually impossibleto conclusively prove or disprove the existence of election fraud. Instead, proceeding onthe basis of circumstantial evidence, we show that the hypothesis of fraud is consistentwith both observed aggregate patterns in the data and the incentives of key players, andthat it provides the most likely explanations for these patterns. The paper is organized asfollows. First, the place of election-related issues in Russian politics before and after 1985is established. In