A Rayon-Level Analysis of the Russian Election and Constitutional Plebiscite of December 1993

Regional Patterns of Political Preference in Russia: The December 1999 Duma Elections

“…To simplify the description and analysis of regional partisan voting patterns, we again treat both groupings of parties and blocs and then disaggregate the groupings to examine the major parties/blocs individually (see Table l). 5 To facilitate comparisons with our studies of the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections, we maintain the same aggregate groupings; that is, parties and blocs are sorted into Reform, Left, Centrist, and Nationalist groupings (Clem and Craumer, 1995a;1995b). 6 However, we recognize that any attempt to categorize the elements of the constantly 5 A11 electoral data referred to here are from the web site of the Russian Central Electoral Commission, www.fci.ru (Tsentral'naya, 1999).…”

Political Geographies and Cleavages in the Russian Parliamentary Elections

“…For smaller units such as rayons (equivalent to counties in the United States), these socioeconomic data are not available or are available only in the oblast offices on an inconsistent basis. Clem and Craumer (1995a) have analyzed rayon electoral data for nine oblasts and, using three predictors (urban/rural status, education, and elderly proportion), were able to confirm relationships that had been identified at the oblast scale. The oblast, kray, and republics vary in size and population from the nearly 7 million voters in Moscow city to the Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:32 09 January 2015 a Russian population is percentage of Russians in the total population.…”

“…The study of Russian electoral outcomes through the political geography lens has been hampered by the inadequacy of socioeconomic data for small areas (Clem and Craumer, 1995a). The internal heterogeneity of oblasts, krays, and autonomous republics makes it very difficult to develop clear tests of cleavage models.…”

“…Kolossov (1993) found that the strength of the "democratic" vote was almost directly proportional to the size of a place, a distinction that is expected to become even more pronounced with increased privatization of the formerly statecontrolled sectors. Clem and Craumer (1995a) demonstrated that the urban-rural split is more pronounced when results within the 89 regions are examined at the rayon (district) level. Aggregation of urban and rural populations at the oblast level hides dramatic rayon-to-rayon disparities.…”

“…But in this area, both parties saw a significant positive increase in their support as the center-reform vote collapsed. The reasons behind this growth of support for more extreme anti-reform parties are strong nationalist appeals to Russians who live in the border areas, the increased economic hardships and deterioration in living standards as the economic transition continues, and a strong regional factor that promotes local economic interests in the face of the collapse of local enterprises (Slider et al, 1994;Clem and Craumer, 1995a).…”