The range and limitation of sub-national regime variations under electoral authoritarianism: The case of Russia

From failed democratization to the war against Ukraine: what happened to Russian institutions under Putin?

“…Nevertheless, elections, even if manipulated and controlled, can still lead to unexpected results and undesired consequences, such as the 2011-2012 mass protests in many Russian cities against the rigged parliamentary elections (Dollbaum 2017). The ultimate reaction to the challenge of holding (and winning) minimally competitive elections by the Kremlin was the subsequent closure of the regime towards a more hegemonic version both at the center and in the regions (Gel'man 2014; Ross and Panov 2019).…”

“…Studies on subnational politics in Russia highlight different features of electoral authoritarianism in the regions, showing how the Kremlin-backed incumbents and candidates win gubernatorial elections, as well as how regional legislative elections help manage intra-elite conflicts and strengthen the co-optation of the systemic opposition (Golosov 2018;Smyth and Turovsky 2018;Ross and Panov 2019). In general, compared with the significant variation of the subnational regimes in the 1990s, ranging from electoral democracies to hegemonic autocracies, the authoritarian turn produced a more homogenized field of subnational regimes limited to the different shades of autocratic rule (Golosov 2011;Ross and Panov 2019;Libman and Rochlitz 2019). Subnational variation was further limited by ethnic and territorial standardization and simplification, as well as the practical destruction of internal borders and imposed mergers of several regions in the 2000s (Chebankova 2007;Busygina 2017).…”

Proletarian Internationalism in Action? Communist Legacies and Attitudes Towards Migrants in Russia

“…The question is whether other factors also matter for the attitude towards migrants. 2 This paper, in particular, singles 1 More generally, heterogeneity of Russian regions has been exploited in numerous empirical studies testing a variety of theoretical claims primarily from the political science perspective (e.g., Gel'man 1999;Hale 2003;Frye 2012;Libman and Obydenkova 2014a;2014b;Saikkonen 2016;Golosov and Konstantinova 2016;Lankina et al 2016b;Obydenkova 2008;Ross and Panov 2018;Buckley and Reuter 2019;Obydenkova and Libman 2012; and economics (e.g., Freinkman and Plekhanov 2009;Bruno et al 2013;Ledyaeva et al 2013;Belousova et al 2016;Sidorkin and Vorobyev 2018). 2 According to Bessonov (2016: 579), if one attempts to explain attitudes towards migrants in Russia looking at individual socio-economic characteristics, one obtains models with much weaker predictive power than one would have obtained for the European countries: "knowing a person's sex, age, level of education, occupation, ethnicity and location provides us with very little information about their views on immigration".…”

‘Mobilized voting’ versus ‘performance voting’ in electoral autocracies: Territorial variations in the levels of support for the systemic opposition parties in Russian municipalities

“…Whilst there have been a large number of studies of the Kremlin's party of power, United Russia (UR) Moraski 2009, 2010;Panov and Ross 2013;Panov and Ross, 2019;White 2015White , 2016Saikkonen 2016;Ross and Panov 2019), and White (2020) has provided an excellent account of the territorial support for the CPRF, there have been no studies which have conducted a comparative analysis of all three systemic opposition parties.…”