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Since 1989 six Central and East European countries have held competitive elections under 17 different electoral systems. After some experimentation, the new electoral systems, adopted on the initiative of noncommunist parties, provided for proportional representation, with legal thresholds designed to protect the new parties from smaller, more recent, and more extreme formations. These legal thresholds favored noncommunist parties initially but subsequently appeared to facilitate a return of postcommunist parties to power. A multivariate model of the effect of electoral system thresholds in 13 elections confirms that they contributed to disproportionality but fails to confirm that they consistently favored either former communist or noncommunist parties. Further analysis reveals that legal thresholds have exaggerated the effect of volatility in the electorates on the representation of parties in parliament, causing systems of proportional representation to behave more like single-member plurality systems.

Besides seat maximization, what factors motivate an incumbent regime in the grey zone between democracy and dictatorship to alter a relatively institutionalized parliamentary electoral system? To answer this question, this article seeks to uncover the rationale guiding the 2005 changes to Russia's electoral system. It presents evidence to suggest that the same strategies that allowed Russia's current party of power to use the existing electoral system to its advantage in the 2003 Duma election, threatened to spoil the fruits of that advantage in the years to come. Yet it also points out that moving from a mixed electoral system to a purely proportional system could be good for Russian democracy in the future. As a result, the work contends that seemingly authoritarian incumbents will promote reforms that aid the future cause of democracy when these same reforms serve their more immediate interests.

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