Three Essays on Russia's Transition to Democracy

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Myagkov, Mikhail G. (1997) Three Essays on Russia's Transition to Democracy. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/vxkh-n941. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:06292020-142832496

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Thesis (Dissertation (Ph.D.))

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Social Science

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California Institute of Technology

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Humanities and Social Sciences

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Social Science

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Public (worldwide access)

Research Advisor(s):

Kiewiet, D. Roderick (advisor)
Davis, Lance E. (co-advisor)

Thesis Committee:

Kiewiet, D. Roderick (chair)
Hoffman, Philip T.
Ordeshook, Peter C.
Plott, Charles R.
Davis, Lance E.

Defense Date:

8 August 1996

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Funding Agency	Grant Number
National Council for Soviet and East European Studies	UNSPECIFIED
John Randolf Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation	UNSPECIFIED

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CaltechTHESIS:06292020-142832496

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https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:06292020-142832496

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10.7907/vxkh-n941

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Myagkov, Mikhail G.	0000-0002-8419-6404

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13832

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Kathy Johnson

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29 Jun 2020 21:39

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Three Essays on Russia's Transition to Democracy Thesis by Mikhail G. Myagkov In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 1996 (graduated 1997) (Submitted August 8, 1996) ·t . !· / ;~ ii © 1996 Mikhail G. Myagkov All Rights Reserved lll Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Roderick Kiewiet, Professor Peter Ordeshook, and Professor Charlie Plott for a great deal of support and encouragement that I received from them while working on this dissertation. I believe that their help and involvement in a number of joint research projects with me became the key factors in my understanding and learning of how research should be conducted. I am indebted to Dr. Alexandr Sobyanin who brought me into Political Science in 1991, and has been a source of many ideas and data that appear in this dissertation. I also would like to acknowledge the financial support of the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies as well as John Randolf Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. iv Contents Acknowledgements iii 1 Introduction 1 2 Czar Rule in the Russian Congress of Peoples' Deputies 8 3 The Russian Electorate Between 1991 and 1995 47 4 Irregularities in the December 1993 Russian Election Returns 81 5 Appendixes 111 Endnotes 115 7 Bibliography 120 6 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Recent years have seen a number of attempts to employ contemporary methods of research in political science to study transitional political processes in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In many instances these attempts are difficult to make, and there is a large degree of uncertainty in the interpretation of :findings. The difficulties of studying newborn democracies in transition emerge from several different sources. First, there is no baseline for this type of research. In other words, there is no conventional wisdom about how to approach many of the problems that arise during the transitional processe. Furthermore, there is no common agreement as to what the problems really are. The processes of political development seem to be so volatile that every new election, every new legislative institution, and every new political twist present scholars with a unique set of puzzles and challenges without any recipes for how to solve them. For example, little is known about legislative behavior of representatives who know for sure that the probability of their legislature surviving the full term is zero, as was the case in the Russian Congress of Peoples' Deputies. This institution began its work as the highest lawmaking authority in Russia, within the Soviet Union. After the USSR collapsed and the presidency in Russia had been established, the Congress found itself in the middle o'f:.a completely different political game. How did this influence the Congress and its behavior? There is no reference point in answering this question because such problems have never arisen before. Secondly, in most instances the rules of the game are either not defined or are not binding on the players. In contemporary political science there is a variety of models which produce predictions about outcomes of different political processes, and also a variety of empirical methods to test the predictions. Most of these methods and models are based on a set of assumptions that people are rational, and rules of the game are well defined and enforceable. Unfortunately, these assumptions can . "'I 2 hardly be sustained during transitional political processes. For example, in Russia campaigning politicians are often uncertain if their appeals should be addressed to voters, who are supposed to vote for them, or to the heads of local elites, who still act like czars in many of the regions. Furthermore, the laws which regulate pre-election campaigns are not binding for some candidates, but are for others. All this makes it difficult to apply standard western reasoning about voting and electoral behavior to elections in Russia. Third, it is often very problematic, if not impossible, to obtain data for empirical research. Following the tradition of the old Soviet regime, when all real data which concerned the USSR were considered to be classified information, nowadays there is still no such thing as "data available to the public." On those rare occasions when it is required by law that data be disclosed to the public, government officials do all their best to resist. In 1994 and 1995 Russian State Duma voted seven times to make the chair of the Central Election Commission publish the results of the December 1993 parliamentary elections. All these attempts were ignored. Furthermore, even if the data or other information becomes available, questions arise about its reliability and authenticity. Thus it is clear that research which concerns transitional political processes to democracy requires more than just the use of conventional means to analyze standard problems that stable democratic countries usually face. It is often necessary to take into account a number of specific and unique factors for a particular country and time period which, combined with appropriate modeling and methodology, might produce results substantially different from what one might infer by merely looking at a process from a standard point of view. The purpose of this dissertation is to identify and study a number of such phenomena in Russian politics between 1990 and 1995, in the context of political and economic reforms, by taking into account all surrounding factors. The phenomena that are studied here represent some of the key issues to understanding how transitional processes in Russian politics actually work, and what one should expect in the future. The main contribution of the dissertation is that the results of extensive formal and empirical analysis presented here solve some of the 3 problems which are viewed by many scholars as puzzles of the transitional period in Russian politics or, at best, have a number of different explanations. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay addresses a general issue of parliaments in transition by focusing on the Russian Congress of Peoples' Deputies. The study of political institutions in the process of reform provides a valuable opportunity for better understanding a number of key factors related to transitional processes. Examples of such factors are the formation of political parties, the adoption of constitutional amendments, the design of election laws, voting behavior and legislative organization. Until recently researchers did not have many of opportunities to study how transitional processes affect relationships between those factors and political institutions. Instead, much of the theoretical as well as empirical work has been done in this field under the assumption of stability as a key axiom. A new era began in late 1980's, with most of the Eastern European countries having started transitions from authoritarian regimes to what, they believed, would eventually become democracies. Not surprisingly, many scholars devoted a great deal of attention to the development of emerging political institutions and party systems (Kitshelt 1992, McGregor 1993). A number of studies have taken Russia as a subject of research in this area (Remington, Smith, Kiewiet and Haspel 1994; Tolz 1990; Wyman, Miller and Heywood 1994). In the view of many analysts and scholars, one of the keys to better understand changes in Russian political institutions is to find explanations for the conflict between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov, which ultimately led to the violent demise of the Congress. Some people even argued that "the violent aftermath of the confrontation between president and parliament casts doubt on the prospects for democratic consolidation in Russia" (Remington 1994). It has been commonly believed that the struggle between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov was the result of a constitutional crisis over the respective powers of president and parliament which, in turn, was an outgrowth of questions unresolved in the Soviet Period. Gorbachev's attempt to infuse democratic practice into soviet structures was a logical impossibility, since the theory of the soviets as the institutional embodiment of state power had never been more than a tactic for seizing power and legitimating 4 Bolshevik party rule (Anweiler 1974). The soviets in practice had never fused leg islative and executive power since both had always lain elsewhere, in the Communist Party. Gorbachev's initial model would have to have been modified sooner or later to resolve the question of relationship between executive and legislative power. As a re sult, in many of the republics of the former USSR where the legislatures had assumed some power, executive-legislative confrontation has followed. Russia presents a very striking example of such a confrontation following the creation of the new presidency, Yeltsin's departure from the legislative branch to fill it, and the deepening rift be tween two branches over their rightful powers to oversee the government at a time of momentous social and economic change. The situation was aggravated in that the Speaker of the RCPD, Khasbulatov, was seen to wield an extremely high degree of agenda control in the formation of public policy. With its roots in the old regime, the position of the Speaker resembled that of Bosses Cannon during the late 19th Century which is referred as "Czar Rule" (Jones 1968). But does the conventional wisdom correctly account for the truth? Was the con flict constitutional in nature? Was the RCPD truly subject to Czar Rule? To answer these questions I construct a formal model, based upon the rules and structure of the Russian Congress of Peoples' Deputies, and, then, characterize equilibrium strategies pursued by an agenda-setting Speaker. In conjunction with information about the distribution of preferences in the RCPD, the Czar Rule model yields several testable hypothesis. The model receives some empirical backing, but overall the results of the analysis do not support it. Therefore, the conflict between Yeltsin government and the RCPD should be attributed to fundamental disagreements over policy and not to internal contradictions in constitutional design. The second part of the dissertation is devoted to the study of elections and electoral preferences in Russia. On 17 December 1995, Russian voters elected representatives to the lower house of the parliament, the State Duma. In spite of the cold winter, the fact that the election did not include balloting on the presidency, and was contested by 43 parties, 65 percent of the eligible voters turned out to vote. Historically the conduct of this election should be viewed as an encouraging step toward democracy. On the other 5 hand, the results seemed not to be so positive for Russia's future. A quick look at the election results shows that "opposition" parties - those who campaigned against the government and reforms - in most instances did better compared to their performance in the December 1993 parliamentary elections. The :flagship of the anti-reformist movement - the Communist Party of Russian Federation - managed to receive almost 25 percent of the total vote. Even though the nationalist party headed by Vladimir Zhirinovskii collected only 50 percent of its previous support, it finished second in the race. Three other representatives of this camp narrowly failed to overcome the 5 percent cutoff barrier which was necessary to qualify for seats in the parliament. On the other side of the spectrum, only two of the reformist parties - the "party of power" headed by the Prime Minister Victor Chernomirdin, and Grigory Yalinsky's "Yabloko" - gained seats in Duma by finishing third and fourth respectively. But what do these results say about what is happening today in Russia? Do they confirm that Russia is still on the path to democracy, or do they suggest that Russia is creeping closer to renewed instability or a rollback of the economic reform process which began in 1992? As mentioned above, almost five years after the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars and analysts still do not share a common description of the processes unfolding in Russia, much less agree on how to explain them. The debate about how to interpret results of elections is not an exception here. In place of hypothesis-testing or theory-building, discussion about Russia's transitional elections is shaped by a dichotomy of "optimists" vs. "pessimists." This applies not only to the most recent parliamentary elections, but also to almost all previous ones. For example, Remington (1994) calls the December 1993 elections "the most stunning example of anti-democratic backlash," referring to the unusually high percentage of votes received by Zhirinovsky's LDPR party. On the other hand, some other authors (McFaul 1994) argue that Russian electors voted for reforms, since pro-government parties received about 60 percent of the vote. The same duality in explaining the election results continued after the last election. Jerry Hough (1996) writes that the gains achieved by Communists between 1993 and 1995 will likely result in their victory in the 1996 presidential elections. In contrast, Sobyanin and Petrov (1996) show that 6 anti-reformist voters still do not account for more than one third of electorate, thus, making the Communist victory a highly unlikely outcome. In an effort to move discussion about Russian electorate beyond the dispute be tween pessimists and optimists, in the second essay of the dissertation I present and test an empirical model of changes in Russia's voters' preferences between 1991 and 1995. This model presents an opportunity to test a number of hypothesis about Rus sian electorate such as: did those voters who supported Boris Yeltsin and reforms continue doing this in 1993 and 1995, or they became dissatisfied with the govern ment, and switched to the communists? Who benefited mostly from sharp decrease in voters' turnout between 1991 and 1995? Answers to such questions not only leave no room for dual interpretation of the events, but also reveal if Russian people are indeed on their way toward democracy. The main difference of my approach to the problem from that of other scholars is that I use a unique and most extensive data set on Russian elections - about 2000 observations - which allows me to employ econo metric techniques and test real hypotheses instead of just speculating on the basis of national aggregate totals. Finally, the last part of the dissertation addresses the problem of detecting pos sible election fraud using aggregated voting data. Fraud, virtually everyone agrees, should not be allowed to decide the election of a public official or a representative. This problem is especially important for the countries which just recently started conducting free and democratic elections. In these states voters still have strong memories of how elections were conducted in the past, and, therefore, they can be easy targets for officials who have incentives to manipulate election outcomes. This is clearly the case in Russia, since the results of democratic reforms there are only visible in a handful of major industrial cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. The rest of the country still lives under the rules which where in effect in the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, in most of the Russia's regions, local authorities acquired the same power, and use the same rules, to govern as did the former Communist Party officials. Moreover, in many instances, these authorities and the former Communist bosses are the very same people. Thus, as far as elections are concerned, suspicions 7 arise about how truthful are the elections' results, which are counted and reported by these bosses. In many cases suspicions are aggravated by the fact that the bosses themselves are candidates, and voting data never became available for the public except for that aggregated at the national level. Since the incentives for election fraud exist, as well as opportunities, the question is whether or not fraud can be detected using just voting data. Of course there is no scientific method capable of supporting the hypothesis about foul play with certainty. One might argue that no matter how weird the data look, voters simply voted that way. This might be the reason why there has been virtually no work done in this field by scholars. Although the methods and results presented in the last essay of the disserfatiOti' give skeptics a rigorous basis for arguing about the probabilities that an election was stolen, what is argued here offers a glimpse at the no-man's land where the law's wish for certainty meets a reality that many events can be explained only in terms of chance, and that alternative explanations always exist. The way I proceed is by making assumptions about what "regular" election results should look versus "irregular" ones. Then I use voting data to detect the irregularities. Finally, the hypothesis of election fraud being behind the irregularities is contrasted to other alternative models. Thus, the strategy of the essay is to act as prosecution does during a jury trial if only circumstantial evidence is available. Of course this type of analysis cannot be used as evidence to indict those people who run the elections, but it can be used to detect specific districts where investigation into electoral procedures should be launched. \ . I "1' 8 Chapter 2 Czar Rule in the Russian Congress of Peoples' Deputies Introduction Political scientists have become increasingly concerned with understanding how the ways in which legislatures are organized and the rules under which they operate affect the choices they make. Prominent examples of work in this area include studies of amendment rules in the U.S. House (Ordeshook and Schwartz 1987, Weingast 1992), unanimous consent agreements in the U.S. Senate (Krehbiel 1986), the "guillotine" and en bloc voting procedures used in the French National Assembly (Huber 1992), and the right of the government in the Italian parliament to propose final amendments (Heller 1994). These studies typically seek to gauge the potential for agenda setting, i.e., the extent to which strategically placed groups or individuals can exploit the structure and rules of the legislature to obtain more preferred outcomes. Agenda setting can mean simply the ability to offer proposals for consideration (Baron and Ferejohn 1989). It can also refer to the ability to bundle multiple proposals into one package (Ferejohn 1986), to determine the sequence in which competing measures are considered (Plott and Levine 1978), and even to select the method of voting to be used (Plott 1982). 1 Often it is meant to describe the extreme case of monopoly proposal power, wherein no one other than the agenda-setter may offer proposals or amendments (Niskanen 1971; Romer and Rosenthal 1979; Denzau and Mackay 1983; Krehbiel 1987). In this chapter we analyze the structure, the rules, and the agenda-setting possi- bilities they created in one of the more important voting bodies ever assembled-the Russian Congress of People's Deputies (RCPD). The RCPD was a 1068-member leg- 9 islature elected in March 1990, from single-member districts. 2 Over the next three years it convened nine times, subjecting over two thousand proposals to roll call votes. The RCPD played a crucial role in the struggle which ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union and collapse of the Communist Party. After electing Boris Yeltsin its Speaker, it approved the Decree on Power which asserted the sovereignty of the Russian state. In May of 1991 it voted to create the office of President, to be chosen through popular election. After the coup attempt of August 1991 it voted to allow newly elected President Yeltsin to rule by decree. But while the RCPD supported Yeltsin in undermining Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, it subsequently resisted the measures Yeltsin and his government proposed to achieve a more market-oriented economy. Under the leadership of Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin's successor as Speaker, the Congress also sought repeatedly to shift policymaking authority away from the executive branch to the legislative. 3 The RCPD ousted many of Yeltsin's top ministers, most notably Yegor Gaidar, and sought repeatedly to impeach Yeltsin himself. In both Russia and abroad, the struggle between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov was often portrayed as a personal one, growing out of raw political ambition and the mutual desire to destroy the other. To a large extent, however, the conflict seems the inevitable consequence of a deep constitutional flaw. With its origins in the old regime, the RCPD maintained the "nesting-dolls" structure of a Congress directed by its Supreme Soviet, which in turn was to follow the lead of a still smaller steering committee, the Presidium. The Speaker of the Congress, who was simultaneously Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and of the Presidium, was seen to wield an extremely high degree of control over the formation of public policy. The Speaker's commanding position was reminiscent of that of Bosses Cannon and Reed in the U.S. Congress during the late 19th Century-a regime that political historians refer to, ironically enough, as "Czar Rule" (Jones 1968). According to one editorialist, "Today, as Stalin did at one time, Khasbulatov has concentrated enormous powers in his hands ... one day quite soon ... we will wake up and discover to our astonishment that all power in the country in fact belongs to Ruslan Imranovich" (Bondarev, 1992, p. 4). 10 Establishment of a powerful Presidency without altering the status of the Speaker would thus imply that Russia effectively had two heads of state (Mishin 1992). Or, as Krivstov (1993) put it, "Attempts by the two leaders (Khasbulatov and Yeltsin) to accumulate all power into the hands of one of them, and the fight resulting from that, has its historical roots ... The country, which was ruled by tsars for centuries, cannot bear two tsars at once." Khasbulatov, in turn, repeatedly asserted that the Yeltsin government was building a "neototalitarian political structure," and that the RCPD, under his leadership, was the only reliable barrier against dictatorship (Chugayev 1993). The crisis ultimately flared into the violent and tumultuous events of September and October of 1993, when Yeltsin dissolved the RCPD and suppressed the insurrection that Khasbulatov, Rutskoi, and opposition deputies had fomented. But was this historic conflict truly constitutional in nature? Was the Speaker a competing head of state? To shed any light on this matter requires us to answer the prior question of whether or not the Speaker did in fact dominate the RCPD. Put another way, was the RCPD subject to Czar Rule? We begin our analysis of these issues by identifying the major rules governing the legislative process in the RCPD, focusing specifically upon the agenda-setting capabilities they conveyed to the Speaker. We then construct a formal model based upon these rules in order to characterize equilibrium strategies pursued by an agendasetting Speaker. This model, in conjunction with information about the distribution of policy preferences in the RCPD, yields a number of empirically testable hypotheses. We test these hypotheses with roll call voting data from the Fourth and Sixth Congresses of the RCPD, which met in May 1991, and April 1992, respectively. Structure and Rules of the RCPD During its brief history the RCPD itself convened only sporadically, in sessions that usually ran for only a week or two at a time. Day-to-day legislative business was thus conducted in the Supreme Soviet (frequently referred to as the Parliament), which was composed of a large subset (252 deputies) of the RCPD's membership. 11 The Supreme Soviet also fell well short of being a full-time professional legislature, and correspondingly delegated the role of formulating an agenda to the Presidium (Remington, Davidheiser, and Smith 1992). Composed of the Speaker, a chief deputy and four other deputy speakers, chairs of the two chambers of the Supreme Soviet, as well as chairs of its commissions and committees, the Presidium contained 35 members in all. Following conventional soviet form, the Speaker of the Congress was simultaneously Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and Chairman of the Presidium. The Speaker's ability to shape proposals to be presented to the Congress would thus appear to be formidable indeed. As Remington, Smith, Kiewiet, and Haspel (1994) put it, "Wielding substantial power over all aspects of the legislative process, the right to adopt certain kinds of decrees, and responsibility for the day-to-day management of the Supreme Soviet, the Presidium enabled an ambitious chairman to develop a significant power base independent of the executive branch (p. 231)." Indicative of the Speaker's sway over legislative business was the fact that the Presidium frequently held closed sessions in Khabulatov's personal office (Remington, Davidheiser, and Smith, 1992). According to one critic, Khasbulatov ruled his parliamentary supporters with "a rod of iron" (Bondarev 1992). The Speaker also appointed members to the many committees and commissions of the Supreme Soviet (deputies did not have to be members of the Supreme Soviet to serve on its committees). Such appointments brought with them a supplemental salary, an office, an apartment in Moscow, and an automobile-important material incentives given that the official salary of deputies was only slightly higher than that of an average industrial worker (Remington, Davidheiser, and Smith 1992). Presumably his ability to allocate such "perks" garnered the Speaker more deference and cooperation than would have otherwise been the case. Upon convening for the first time in May 1990, deputies elected to the RCPD voted to abide by the "Temporary Rules of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies." These rules were virtually identical to the rules governing the Union Congress of People's Deputies, which in turn drew heavily upon rules governing Congresses of the 12 Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Given that Party Congresses had routinely adopted all measures recommended by the General Secretary by a unanimous vote, it is not remarkable that such details of parliamentarianism as quorum requirements and amendment procedures failed to receive much scrutiny. These rules stipulated that any group, fraction, or bloc could bring proposals to the floor after obtaining support from one-fifth of the full membership. 4 One-fifth of the full membership could also demand a roll call vote. The RCPD also established an Editorial Committee which could bring forth proposals, or, more commonly, amendments, to proposals under consideration. Almost all major legislative proposals, however, were reported to the Congress by the Supreme Soviet. Proposals to amend the Russian Constitution, which made up the lion's share of legislative business in some sessions, were required to have come through the Supreme Soviet. Consideration of legislation by the RCPD was to begin with a vote to accept a bill "as background;" if that vote carried, amendments were then in order. In the Sixth Congress and in subsequent sessions, however, the RCPD frequently dispensed with the initial vote and simply began working on the bill after its introduction by Speaker Khasbulatov. All amendments were submitted to the Speaker, who then decided the order in which they would be considered. Once an amendment was approved, the amended version of the proposal became the current version of legislation. Amendments could pertain to only one article or chapter of a bill, which implied that amendments to derail consideration of the bill (say by striking the enacting clause) were not in order. After all amendments were acted upon, the RCPD took a final vote to accept the resultant legislation "as a whole." At any point in the amendment process the Speaker could propose that the Congress adopt the current version of the bill as a whole without further amendments. The Speaker could also employ the Editorial Committee as a mechanism for bringing new amendments to the floor. Indeed, Khasbulatov frequently relied upon this committee, which most observers viewed to be his agent, to construct substitute bills that were submitted to the RCPD for an up-or-down vote. A vote of one-half of the full number of elected deputies was required for passage 13 of ordinary legislation, but amendments to the Constitution required the approval of two-thirds of the full membership. Because approval thresholds were based upon the full membership rather than members present and voting, not voting was functionally equivalent to voting no. Once the Congress accepted as background a proposal to amend the Constitution, any amendment to that proposal also required approval by two-thirds of the full number of elected deputies. As we shall see, this highly idiosyncratic rule had tremendous implications for the workings of the RCPD and for the agenda-setting possibilities available to the Speaker. In the following section we construct a model of Czar Rule, a model which has much in common with the setter model of Romer and Rosenthal (1979) and with the monopolistic committee model of Denzau and Mackay (1983). Because of their substantive importance, we focus upon the consideration of constitutional amendments, which, as indicated above, required approval by two-thirds of the entire membership. As is always the case, there is an inescapable tension between the imperatives of the model-clarity, simplicity, and logical consistency-and the substantive phenomenon being modeled, which is inevitably far more complicated, conditional, and ambiguous. It should also be kept in mind that the model and the assumptions that underlie it are not meant to mirror reality as closely as possible, but rather to identify a particular set of conditions that would allow an agenda-setting Speaker to exercise Czar Rule. From such a model we hope to derive empirically testable hypotheses that would not otherwise have been surmised. Combined with knowledge of the distribution of preferences in the RCPD, our model of Czar ':e,ule does in fact yield a number of predictions regarding bill introduction, amendment activity, and the division of roll call votes. To the extent the hypotheses derived from this model are supported by the data, the RCPD can be characterized as having been subject to Czar Rule. A Model of Czar Rule We denote the status quo (which we assume to be e;x:ogenous) as B 0 , and a proposal " to change it as B*. The Speaker's agenda-setting,'.powers in the Presidium and in 14 the Supreme Soviet are assumed to allow him to control proposals reported to the Congress by the Supreme Soviet, so we assume that the Speaker chooses B*. This is admittedly an extreme assumption; among other things, in principle a majority of the RCPD could always vote to elect a new Speaker if dissatisfied with the current one. The assumption, however, is also a crucial one: a Speaker without the ability to substantially shape proposals emerging from the Presidium and Supreme Soviet could not effect Czar Rule. As can be gathered from the discussion above, our case for the plausibility of this assumption rests primarily upon the Speaker's control over appointments to the Presidium and to the Supreme Soviet, its committees, and commissions. It is also the case that this assumption is very similar to that made by Romer and Rosenthal (1979) in applying their agenda-setting model to local school referenda. 5 The initial vote taken is to approve B* as background, i.e., B* is posed against B 0 . If B* fails, B 0 remains in force. If B* passes, it becomes the new status quo and consideration of amendments begins. Deputies, after observing B 0 and B*, each choose whether or not to offer amendments. The Speaker then chooses the order in which amendments are to be voted on, and the deputies subsequently observe the set of amendments that the Speaker has ordered for consideration. The next vote is B* versus the first amendment. If it passes, the amended bill becomes a current status quo. Otherwise B* remains the current status quo and is voted against the second amendment, and so on. B 1 is the proposal which remains after all amendments have been considered. (B 1 = B* if all amendments were rejected.) The final vote in the sequence is to accept the bill "as a whole," i.e., B 1 versus B 0 . As pointed out earlier, the Speaker can also choose to ask for consideration of the bill as a whole (i.e., final passage) without amendments, or, at any point in the sequence, without any subsequent amendments. We assume that each deputy i (with i* corresponding to the Speaker) has an ideal point hi along a single dimension, that all preferences are single-peaked, and that the shape of utility functions is invariant to location in the policy space. 6 We also assume that all deputies have complete information about all other deputies' utility 15 functions, including that of the Speaker. How much of an abstraction is it to assume that the policy space is unidimensional? Not much, we think. Previous studies of the RCPD indicate that voting patterns were dominated by support for or opposition to a nexus of political and economic reforms-the devolution of power away from the Union, the elimination of the Communist Party's constitutional guarantee of power, a transition to a more market-oriented economy, and respect for human rights (Smyth 1990; Embree, 1991; Sobianin, 1993; Remington, Smith, and Kiewiet 1994). Because preferences are single-peaked, each deputy will have, for every alternative being considered, another point that provides an identical amount of utility (except, of course, for his ideal point). Because the deputy is indifferent between these two alternatives, this point is called an indifference point. Thus the point ri (x) is an indifference point for deputy i relative to a point x iff Ui(ri(x)) = Ui(x) and ri(x) =f. x. We further assume that deputies vote sincerely, which means that on each roll call they vote for the alternative that is closer to their own ideal point. The pairing of any two alternatives thus produces a cutpoint in the distribution: all deputies on one side of the cutpoint vote for the bill, while all those on the other side vote against it. As noted previously, constitutional amendments required approval by two-thirds of the entire membership. Once the RCPD accepted as background a proposal to amend the Constitution, subsequent attempts to amend that proposal also required approval by two-thirds of the full membership. This has a very important implication. It means that any point located between the ideal point of the one-third voter on the reform-anti-reform dimension (i.e., one-third of the deputies are to his left, twothirds to his right) and the ideal point of the two-thirds voter (two-thirds of the deputies are to his left, one-third to his right) cannot be beaten in pairwise voting by any other point. If these ideal points are denoted as c1 and c2 respectively, the interval [c1 .. c2] (the middle third of the preference distribution) is thus the core of the voting game. 7 For a point to be in the core does not mean that it would be approved by either two-thirds or even by a simple majority. Whether or not it is approved depends upon the alternative it is paired against. What it does mean is that once a point 16 in the core is accepted as the status quo, it cannot subsequently be defeated by any other proposal. The deputies whose ideal points are at c1 and c2 are indexed l and r, respectively. We also refer to them as the one-third pivotal voter and the two-thirds pivotal voter. We now consider equilibrium strategies and outcomes, under the assumptions of sincere voting and complete information, given different locations of the initial status quo B 0 and the Speaker's ideal point. The Speaker acts to achieve a final outcome that is as close to his ideal point as possible. All deputies, as indicated earlier, are assumed in each pairwise vote to vote for the alternative that is closer to their own ideal point, and a supermajority of two-thirds of the membership is required for approval. Proofs of the following propositions are provided in the Appendix, but they can also be readily verified by referring to the configurations portrayed in Figures 1 and 2. The following discussion assumes, for the sake of brevity, that all deputies are voting. Figures 1 and 2 about here Suppose B 0 belongs to the core, which is the middle third of the distribution bounded by c1 and c2 . In this case any B* brought to the :floor will fail to muster a twothirds majority against B 0 , and the Speaker cannot subsequently achieve anything other than B 0 . But what if B 0 lay to the left of the core, i.e., B 0 < c1 ), as shown in Figure 1? If the Speaker's ideal point is also to the left of B 0 , he will simply choose not to make a proposal and retain B 0 . If the Speaker's ideal point is between B 0 and c1 (which is the ideal point of the one-third pivotal voter and thus the left edge of the core), the outcome is whichever of these two points the Speaker prefers. He achieves B 0 by offering nothing and c1 by offering c1 . 8 As we continue to move the Speaker's ideal point to the right, however, we see that the Speaker can achieve any point in the interval [c1 ; r 1(B 0 )], which is the interval bounded by the ideal point of the one-third pivotal voter (the edge of the core) and by the indifference point of the pivotal voter vis-a-vis (B 0 ). If the Speaker's ideal point is inside the interval, he can thus achieve it by offering his ideal point as B*. 17 If his ideal point is to the right of this interval, then the best he can achieve is the indifference point of the pivotal voter, r 1(B 0 ). 9 What happens if the status quo is to the right of the core, i.e., B 0 > c2 ? As shown in Figure 2, the outcomes are perfectly symmetrical to those that obtain when the status quo is to the left of the core. We need only to substitute "left" for "right," c1 for c2 , and r 1(B 0 ) for rr(B 0 ). We can now see that the Czar Rule model differs from previous setter models in a fundamental way. In the setter model, strategic advantage derives from having monopoly proposal power; there are always a range of alternatives that can defeat the setter's proposal in pairwise voting, but the agenda-setter can simply block consideration of majority-preferred alternatives. The· large core resulting from the twothirds majority requirement, however, means that Czar Rule does not hinge on having monopoly proposal power. The key is instead the right to make the initial proposal. As long as B* is in the core, there are no points preferred to it by two-thirds of the voters, and all attempts to defeat it fail. As indicated earlier, the rules of the RCPD conveyed to the Speaker tremendous sway over the amendment process. He could determine the order of amendments, and at any time propose to halt amendment activity and call for a final vote. Working through the Editorial Committee, he could even submit entirely new versions of bills. Another implication of the large core in the Czar Rule model, then, is that the Speaker's strategic placement of the initial proposal to the RCPD obviates the role of amendments in the process, and renders superfluous these many additional parliamentary privileges. In a nutshell, the Czar Rule model implies that any proposal that the Speaker puts forth to the Congress should be in the core. The Congress should therefore accept all such proposals and reject any attempts to amend them. Empirical Implications As outline above, the Czar Rule model is quite general. What the Speaker proposes and what he can achieve depend upon exactly how the status quo, the core, 18 the Speaker's ideal point, and the preferences of the deputies are configured. Before we can derive any hypotheses we must therefore estimate some key distributional parameters. The methodology we employ for this task is the NOMINATE procedure developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1985), which uses roll call voting data to simultaneously estimate the spatial locations of voters, cutpoints, and alternatives. We use data from two Congresses, the Fourth and the Sixth, that are of particular importance and interest. First, because the Czar Rule model pertains to bills in which approval by a two-thirds supermajority is required, we need constitutional bills in order to test it. The deputies acted upon a much larger number of constitutional matters in these two congresses than in any others. The Fourth dealt primarily with a series of measures related to the creation of the office of the Presidency and to the conduct of presidential elections. The Sixth voted on a large number of constitutional questions in what eventually turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to achieve reform through article-by-article amendments to the 1978 Constitution. In addition to considering guarantees of human rights and social welfare, the Sixth Congress acted upon several proposals to shift power away from the executive branch to the legislative. Secondly, even though the Congresses were held less than a year apart, they were run by two different speakers in two very different contexts. The Fourth, presided over by Boris Yelstin, was held in May 1991. This was during the period of confrontation between Yeltsin and the RCPD on one side and Gorbachev and the failing Soviet regime on the other, a period which culminated in the failed coup attempt of August. The Sixth, presided over by Ruslan Khasbulatov, met in April 1992. By this time the euphoria of the previous fall had faded, and disenchantment with reform and with the Yeltsin government was rising. If the results of our analyses are similar in these two very different Congresses, we can thus have considerable confidence in their robustness. As advised by Poole and Rosenthal, in running NOMINATE we eliminated roll calls in which less than 2.5 percent of the deputies were on the minority side. This resulted in a sample of 190 roll call votes in the Fourth Congress and 528 in the 19 Sixth. The first dimension fitted by NOMINATE correctly classified 85.2 and 84.9 percent of the votes, respectively. Fitting a second and a third dimension resulted in an improvement in classification accuracy of less than one percent. 10 While we do not reject the presence of multidimensionality in the data, voting behavior in the Fourth and Sixth Congresses of the RCPD can be largely accounted for by a one-dimensional, pro-reform anti-reform policy dimension. NOMINATE estimates of deputies' locations are normalized, putting the extreme pro-reform score at -1 and the most anti-reform at +1. Figures 3 and 4 display the distributions of deputies' NOMINATE scores in the Fourth and Sixth Congresses of the RCPD, respectively. Because the roll calls from each Congress were scaled separately, cross-the-board movements in the entire membership cannot be detected. However, comparison of the two figures shows that a bimodal distribution with roughly equal shares of deputies in the reformist and antireformist camps gave way to unimodal distribution centered on the right (antireformist) side of the spectrum. Sobianin (1993) and many other observers of the RCPD also note a shrinkage over time in the reformist ranks. This is consistent with their observations, and bolsters confidence in the validity of the NOMINATE scores. Figures 3 and 4 about here Additional evidence concerning NOMINATE scores is provided in Table 1, which reports the average scores for different fractions in the Sixth Congress along with a) average factor analysis scores for the same fractions ~aken from Remington, Smith, and Kiewiet, 1994), and b) government support scores, calculated as percent voting yes minus percent voting no on a key no confidence motion (Yakovenko 1992). As these data show, NOMINATE and factor analysis generate scalings that closely resemble each other, and that also coincide with journalistic assessments of the relative ideological positions of RCPD fractions on the reform-antireform dimension. 11 Table 1 about here The ideal points of Speakers Yeltsin and Khasbul~tov, as reported in Table 2, are ., . I 20 estimated to be -.39 and -.17, respectively, placing both solidly in the ranks of the proreform fractions. Yeltsin's placement comes as no surprise, but Khasbulatov's might. Before entering political life, Khasbulatov had been a leading free-market economist at the Plekhanov Institute, a proponent of private property rights, and a reliable Yeltsin supporter. Supporters of reform, however, charged that upon succeeding to the Speakership he had treacherously sold them out, joining with the opposition in a crass bid for political power. Khasbulatov repeatedly protested that he was seeking only to slow the otherwise reckless pace of reform, and to guard against dictatorial tendencies emerging in the executive branch (a concern shared by many democrats). Whatever the case, we accept the NOMINATE estimate of Khasbulatov's ideal point as the best available. Determining the location of the one-third and two-thirds pivotal voters, and thus the edges of the core, is a bit tricky. As noted previously, approval thresholds in the RCPD were based upon the full membership and not upon those present, meaning that not voting was equivalent to voting "no." Consequently, as the proportion of deputies casting votes decreases, the locations of the pivotal voters are likely to become more extreme and the size of the core to expand. In the case of exactly twothirds turnout, for example, the pivotal voters would be the extreme left and extreme right voters, and a constitutional bill could be passed only if it received unanimous approval from all deputies present and voting. The size of the core would not be affected, however, if all abstentions were strategic, i.e., if all deputies who failed to vote would have voted "no" if they had voted. As the rate of strategic abstention increases, of course, the core will expand less but will do so asymmetrically. One of the empirical issues to be subsequently addressed is to determine the extent to which abstentions in the RCPD were strategic. For present purposes, however, we proceed by assuming that all deputies were equally likely to abstain on all votes at a rate equal to the average abstention rate in that Congress, i.e., 20 percent in the Fourth Congress and 24 percent in the Sixth. It would be risky, though, for the Speaker to act on the basis of average turnout; half the time turnout would be lower than that, and the pivotal voters consequently located 21 at more extreme positions. Proposals made by the Speaker under the assumption of average turnout, however, could frequently fall short of approval, risking the possibility of alternative proposals that would make him worse off. We thus make the additional assumptions that turnout was normally distributed, and that the Speaker's proposal strategy was premised on a "reliable" rate of turnout one standard deviation less than average. Locations of the pivotal voters under the assumptions of average and reliable turnout are also presented in Table 2. As the table entries indicate, pivotal voter locations are more extreme under the reliable turnout assumption, but by a surprisingly small amount. The reason why their locations covary so little with turnout is because the voters we identify as pivotal are surrounded by large clusters of deputies with very similar NOMINATE scores. Referring back to Figure 3, we see that the peaks of the bimodal (reformist vs. antireformist) distribution that characterizes NOMINATE scores in the Fourth Congress were at about -.5 and +.5-exactly where we place the locations of the one-third and two-thirds pivotal voters. In the Sixth Congress NOMINATE scores describe a unimodal distribution, but there are still heavy concentrations of deputies in the neighborhoods of the pivotal voters. We now come to the last set of parameters to be determined-the location of the status quo points in votes taken on constitutional matters. As indicated earlier, for each roll call, NOMINATE estimates locations of the two alternatives paired against each other (as well as the cutpoint located midway between them). Unlike estimates of deputy ideal points, however, estimates of the vote parameters are not normalized. The manner in which they are calculated is also considerably different. 12 We thus adopted a conservative strategy and use the NOMINATE status quo estimates only to determine on which side of the core the status quo was located. According to these data, 20 of the 21 constitutional bills approved by the Fourth Congress had status quo points located to the right of the core, as did 27 of the 41 votes taken in the Sixth. These findings are hardly surprising, given that almost all B 0 's were provisions of the Brezhnev-Era Constitution of 1978. As all bills under consideration here· had been approved by the RCPD, none of the status quos were 22 located inside the core. By far the most frequent configuration present in the RCPD data, then, is consistent with the situation portrayed in Figure 2, with the Speaker's ideal point located in the left side of the core and the status quo to the right. In short, the NOMINATE scores tell us that in both the Fourth and Sixth Congresses a relatively pro-reform Speaker typically confronted a status quo located far to the right, and thus a pivotal voter located squarely in the ranks of the opponents of reform. As can be seen by referring back to Figure 2, exactly what the Speaker can do and what he can accomplish in this situation depends upon the location of his ideal point relative to the indifference point of the pivotal voter. Unfortunately, the pivotal voter's indifference point is not something that we can observe. In a manner that is consistent with what Romer and Rosenthal assume in their model, we assume here that the Speaker's ideal point is to the left of the two-thirds pivotal voter. 13 We think that this assumption is a safe one, primarily because the RCPD, whose members ranged from radical free-market supporters of shock therapy to unapologetic proponents of soviet communism, spanned as much ideological distance than any legislature in history. For it to be otherwise would require the two-thirds pivotal voter, comfortably ensconced in either the Agrarian or Communist fractions of the RCPD with a NOMINATE score of .5, to be so dissatisfied with the articles of the 1978 Constitution that he would prefer instead the policy platform of Democratic Russia. If this were the case, the path of reform legislation in the RCPD would have been far more felicitous than proved to be the case. In the minority of cases in which the status quo is on the left, the analogous assumption that the Speaker's ideal point is to the right of the one-third pivotal voter is more problematic. This is due, of course, to the fact that the ideal points of both Yeltsin and Khasbulatov were considerably closer to the one-third pivotal voter than to the two-thirds pivotal voter. As a result, the Speaker may have been able to obtain his ideal point without having to drive the one-third pivotal voter all the way to his indifference point. In the analyses to follow we will thus consider separately the situations in which the status quo was on the left from the situations when it was on the right. 23 As in Niskanen (1971), Romer and Rosenthal (1979), and other setter models, then, in most cases the key to the Speaker's strategy was to make a proposal that the pivotal voter just barely preferred to the reversionary status quo. This leads directly to some additional testable propositions. As indicated earlier, pitting a proposal against the status quo produces a cutpoint that divides the supporters of the proposal from its opponents. If the Speaker does succeed in making a proposal that the pivotal voter just barely prefers to the status quo, the number of deputies on the "approve" side of the cutpoint should be equal to the minimum (two-thirds of the membership) required for passage. In the case of negative status quos, of course, this may not have been the case. As indicated earlier, in such situations the Speaker may have been able to obtain his ideal point, and would not need to drive the pivotal voter all the way to his indifference point. If so, approval margins would be larger for bills with (negative) status quos on the left than with (positive) status quos on the right. An analysis of vote margins, however, is only partially informative. Minimal winning margins could be constituted by patterns of roll call voting quite different than that predicted by the model, i.e., that everyone on one side of the cutpoint votes for the bill and everyone on the other side votes against it. Bills could be approved, for example, by ad hoc majorities cobbled together across the entire ideological spectrum of the Congress. Another implication of the model, then, is that proposals that the pivotal voter just barely prefers to the status quo create cutpoints that are at the very edge of the core. As in the case of vote margins, when the status quo was negative the Speaker may not have had to "hardball" the pivotal voter to obtain his most preferred outcome. If so, cutpoints for bills with negative status quos would be farther away from the edge of the core and closer to the extreme than the cutpoints for bills with positive status quos. The NOMINATE procedure estimates cutpoints for every vote that is scaled, so this hypothesis can be readily tested. In reality, of course, roll call data in the Russian Congress, as in the the U.S. Congress, do not conform to the idealized pattern predicted by the formal model. More specifically, the cutpoints estimated by NOMINATE do not precisely cleave the distribution into two opposing camps; on every 24 vote there are deputies on each side of the cutpoint that vote in the direction opposite to that predicted. It remains the case, however, that the cutpoint that is estimated is the best prediction possible as to where support for a bill starts and opposition ends. For the purposes of our analysis, this is sufficient. A final issue we need to confront before turning to the empirical tests of the Czar Rule model is the nature of the null hypothesis: in evaluating the empirical merits of the model, what is the standard that we are to hold it against? When we consider the major reasons why the model might perform poorly in accounting for the data, we think the most compelling alternative is that outcomes of the legislative process in the RCPD were driven by the pivotal voter and not by the Speaker. And there are many good reasons why the model might perform poorly. First, it may be that the Speaker was not able, as assumed by the Czar Rule model, to make credible, one-shot, "take it or leave it" offers to the pivotal voter. Consider once again the situations portrayed in Figures 1 and 2. Standing between the outcome desired by the Speaker and the reversionary status quo, the pivotal voter may well have reasoned that if he rejected the Speaker's initial proposal, the Speaker would counter with a better offer. As a consequence, the Speaker's initial proposal may have been somewhat farther away from his own ideal point and closer to the ideal point of the pivotal voter. If so, we would observe cutpoints that move out from the edge of the core and toward the extreme of the distribution of deputies' ideal points. We would also observe approval of the Speaker's proposals by over-size vote margins. Similarly, the Speaker could also have been uncertain about the distribution of preferences among the deputies. Fearful of suffering defeat in an unforgiving political environment, this uncertainty might have made him risk-averse. Proposals made to the Congress and the bills that were ultimately approved might thus have been farther from the ideal point of the Speaker, and closer to the ideal point of the pivotal voter, than the Czar Rule model would predict. As before, the consequence of this breakdown in a key assumption of the model would be cutpoints that move out from the edge of the core and toward the extreme of the distribution of deputies' ideal points, and approval by overly large vote margins. 25 Thirdly, it could be that the Presidium, and, by extension, the Supreme Soviet, were not the mere instruments of the Speaker's will that the Czar Rule model assumes. The major theme in Remington, Davidheiser, and Smith's (1992) study of the Supreme Soviet is not one of deference to the Speaker, but rather of the great efforts undertaken to achieve consensus in the RCPD. As before, our expectation about what would result from this breakdown of a key assumption is outcomes that favor the pivotal voter over the Speaker, overly large approval margins, and cutpoints located away from the edge of the core and out toward the extremes of the distribution. To quickly summarize, the Czar Rule model we have developed yields the following hypotheses: 1. Any proposal that the Speaker puts forth to the Congress is in the core. The Congress should therefore accept all such proposals and reject any attempts to amend them. 2. The key to the Speaker's strategy is to make proposals that the pivotal voter just barely prefers to the status quo. As a consequence, all bills should be approved by the minimum number of votes required. In the case of constitutional matters, this is two-thirds of the entire membership. 3. If the Speaker makes a proposals that the pivotal voter just barely prefers to the status quo, the cutpoint should be at the very left edge of the core if the status quo is on the (reformist) left and on the right edge if the status quo is on the (anti-reformist) right. Amendment Activity To test our first hypothesis, we need to ascertain the frequency and fate of amendments posed against bills introduced by the Speaker. To reiterate, all bills introduced by the Speaker should lay in the core, implying that they should all pass and that all attempts to amend them should fail. Table 3 reports the number of bills introduced, the number that were approved, the number of amendments offered by deputies, and the fate of these amendments for the Fourth and Sixth Congress, respectively. . i 26 Table 3 about here According to the entries in this table, almost all constitutional bills introduced by the Speaker to the RCPD were ultimately approved. Before doing so, however, the Fourth considered over one hundred amendments to these bills. Most were rejected, but nearly every bill was subject to at least one amendment attempt and about half (11 of 24) were in fact amended prior to final approval. Three of these bills picked up multiple amendments. Data from Khasbulatov's Sixth Congress are somewhat different. The RCPD considered more than twice as many constitutional bills, but fewer than half of these bills were subject to an amendment. Over two-thirds were approved in the same form in which they had been introduced. Not all amendment attempts, however, were equally likely to succeed. As indicated earlier, the Editorial Committee of the RCPD was responsible for preparing the final text of bills, and in so doing could offer final amendments. As the entries in Table 4 indicate, amendments offered by this committee were approved virtually every time. In contrast, those sponsored by individual deputies (who, in many cases, were acting on behalf of a group or fraction) were almost always rejected. Table 4 about here The Editorial Committee's success rate was no doubt inflated by the fact that in some cases the amendments they reported were innocu_gus, technical changes to the language of the bill. This was particularly true in the Fourth Congress; the most consequential of the Editorial Committee's amendments adopted in this session was one that extended the President's immunity from criminal prosecution to the Vice-President. Editorial changes were clearly more substantive, however, under the "streamlined" procedures employed by Khasbulatov in the Sixth Congress. In the Fourth Congress, Editorial Committee amendments were considered prior to a final vote on the bill as a whole, i.e., the bill (either amended or not, versus the status quo). This is in keeping with parliamentary practice in most Western legislatures. In the Sixth Congress, however, Editorial Committee amendments were introduced and considered only after a vote to accept the bill as a whole had failed. At that time 27 Khasbulatov would subject the bill as amended by the Editorial Committee to a final vote, rather than hold an initial vote on the amendment(s) followed by a vote on the bill. This procedure was employed 19 times during the Sixth Congress, and resulted in the approval of 14 bills that had previously been rejected. That any bills failed and that any amendments were approved by the RCPD obviously P<?Ses serious problems for the Czar Rule model; the predictions were that all bills should have been accepted, not just most of them, and that all amendments should have failed, not just most of them. On the other hand, the data on successful amendment activity is not necessarily all that damaging if the Speaker orchestrates this activity. The fact that amendments rarely passed without the sponsorship of the Editorial Committee suggests that this was the case, particularly given the closed rule procedures Khasbulatov invoked in the Sixth Congress for consideration of the amended bills that it reported. What we make of these data, then, depends heavily upon what we make of the Editorial Committee. Analysis of their roll call voting records shows that the Committee was ideologically quite representative of the RCPD as a whole. As in the case of committees and commissions of the Supreme Soviet, however, all members of the Editorial Committee were named by the Speaker, and were generally seen by RCPD deputies as acting as agents of the Speaker. We will return to the matter of Editorial Committee amendments at a later juncture. For now, though, support afforded to the Czar Rule model by the data on amendment activity is partial and uneven at best. Roll Call Vote Margins Our second hypothesis about Czar Rule is that all bills were approved by the minimum number of votes required. This is based on the assumption that the pairing of any proposal against the status quo produces a cutpoint, and that all deputies on one side of the cutpoint vote for the bill while all those on the other side vote against it. Making the pivotal voter indifferent between the bill and status quo thus implies that 28 the bill will pass with no margin to spare. Because of attrition, the total number of deputies in the Fourth and Sixth Congresses were 1064 and 1050, respectively, which means that the actual number of votes required to approve constitutional matters were 708 in the Fourth and 700 in the Sixth. 14 As indicated above, in the Sixth Congress 14 bills that were initially rejected by the RCPD eventually passed after being amended. As Romer, and Rosenthal, and Ladha (1984) point out, in rejecting a proposal voters necessarily reveal information about the distribution of their preferences and about turnout. An agenda setter can presumably use this information to better gauge the location of the pivotal voter's indifference point and to thus obtain more preferred outcomes. If this is the case, we would predict approval margins to be smaller for the 14 (amended) bills that had previously been rejected. Table 5 thus divides bills from the Sixth Congress into two cate~ories: 1) those that were approved by the RCPD without amendment, and 2) those that initially failed but that were subsequently amended and approved. Table 5 about here As the data in this table indicate, only 2 of the 21 constitutional bills approved in the Fourth Congress passed with approval margins under 70 percent. Most, in fact, garnered margins of over 76 percent, which is about a hundred votes, or 10 percent of the entire corps of deputies, more than necessary. Figures for bills in the Sixth Congress that were unamended by the Editorial Committee were similar. Only 10 of 41 passed with less than 70 percent support, and over half exceeded the 76 percent support level. We had also speculated that because the two Speakers' ideal points were on the reformist side of the spectrum that approval margins might be larger for bills with (negative) status quos on the left than with (positive) status quos on the right. The small number of bills with status quos makes it hard to make reliable comparisons, but we found no evidence of assymetry. The average approval margin for bills with negative status quos was almost identical to that for bills with positive status quos. Overall, these results imply that Speakers Yeltsin and Khasbulatov did not achieve 29 outcomes that the pivotal voter just barely preferred to the status quo. We cannot tell at this point why Speakers and Yeltsin brought forth bills that passed by such large margins. Whatever the case, the oversized majorities by which these bills passed suggest that the Speakers were not obtaining outcomes that were as close to their ideal points as the Czar Rule model would predict. The entries in Table 5 also reveal the true impact of the requirement that constitution bills receive the approval of two-thirds of the entire membership. In the Fourth Congress the number of nonvoting deputies on constitutional bills averaged 213, or about 20 percent of the membership. In the Sixth Congress the number was 251, or about 24 percent. Because of these high rates of nonvoting, constitutional bills approved in these Congresses generally received the support of over 90 percent of the deputies who were present and voting. Even bills that passed by a bare minimum were supported by over 80 percent of the deputies who were there to cast a vote. There is, then, a strong rationale for what Remington, Smith, and Davidheiser (1992) report to be the Supreme Soviet's tendency to craft proposals supported by large, lopsided majorities: for a constitutional bill to be adopted by those deputies of the RCPD who were present and voting, the majority needed to be large and lopsided! Finally, vote figures reported in the third column of Table 5 support the hypothesis that the Speaker in the Sixth Congress, Khasbulatov, was extracting relevant information from the cases in which the RCPD failed to approve a bill that had been presented to them. Seven of the fourteen bills that were saved by amendments following their initial rejection by the RCPD passed with margins under 70 percent. On average, these 14 bills received approval from an average of 753 deputies, or by only five percent more of the membership than that required by the two-thirds criterion. These approval margins were only about half the size of those by which the bills that were initially successful, and lend support to Romer, Rosenthal, and Ladha's (1984) conjecture. Except for this evidence of an agenda-setting Speaker learning from rejected initial offers, however, our findings concerning vote margins are not supportive of the Czar Rule model. Because approval thresholds in the RCPD were based upon the total membership, 30 not voting, as we have previously observed, was equivalent to voting "no." In order to determine the extent to which deputies who opposed a bill availed themselves of the strategy of simply failing to vote, we divided the membership into three categories on the basis of their NOMINATE scores-those to the left of the "reliable" core, those to the right, and those in the middle-and cross-tabulated them with their votes, which were either "yes," "no," or not voting. If abstentions were strategic rather than random, we should observe the abstention rate to be markedly higher among that group of deputies (on either the left or the right) that also tended to vote "no." Looking at all the constitutional roll call votes in the Sixth Congress, we found the strong correlation we were looking for between voting "no" and abstaining in about half the cases. On some votes a large majority of nonsupportive votes were in fact abstentions. On the other hand, in about half the cases the abstention rate varied little with the pattern of "yes" and "no" votes. We were not able to make any headway in discerning why deputies sometimes chose to vote "no" and sometimes chose to abstain. Pro-reform deputies were just as likely as anti-reform deputies to strategically abstain. Moreover, nothing in the substance of the bills provided any clues as to why deputies chose to do one thing or the other. At this point we can only suggest that this question certainly is worthy of additional research. Cutpoint Locations Our third set of analyses pertain to the locations of the cutpoints of bills approved by the RCPD. To reiterate, because the status quos in our dataset are all located to the extreme right or to the extreme left, the key to the Speaker's strategy is to make the pivotal voter indifferent between the bill that he proposes and the status quo. If the Speaker succeeds in doing so, the cutpoint on the vote would be located at the edge of the core (the right edge if the status quo is to the right, the left edge if it is to the left). If, on the other hand, we observe cutpoints out toward the extremes of the distribution, the implication is the same as in our analysis of vote margins-that the outcomes are more favorable to the pivotal voter, and less favorable to the Speaker, 31 than posited by the Czar Rule model. We should not, of course, observe any cutpoint locations within the core, as this implies the bill could not muster the two-thirds margin of support required for passage. Locations of cutpoints for the constitutional bills approved by the Fourth and Sixth Congresses, as estimated by the NOMINATE procedure, are reported in Table 6. As previously, we report separately the cutpoint locations of the 14 bills that, in the Sixth Congress, initially failed but subsequently passed after being amended by the Editorial Committee. In all instances, all bills with negative cutpoints were associated with status quos on the left, and all positive cutpoints, with status quos on the right. Table 6 about here As the entries here indicate, cutpoints for some of the constitutional bills approved by the RCPD were, as posited by the Czar Rule model, located at the edges of the core. 15 Most, however, are instead far out at the extremes. In the Sixth Congress, nearly half had cutpoints more extreme than .9 or -.9. This was also the case for 16 of the 21 bills approved during the Fourth Congress. Consistent with the ·previous analysis of approval margins, there is also no evidence to support our conjecture that bills with negative status quos would have more extreme cutpoints. Although there are too few of them to say anything definitive, the .entries in Table 6 suggest that, if anything, the cutpoints for bills with negative status quos were less extreme, not more. Also consistent with the previous analysis o'f... vote margins is the fact that the substitute bills that came out of the Editorial Committee in the Sixth Congress tended to have cutpoints located closer to the edges of the core than those of other bills. As before, this suggests that Khasbulatov was able to use information from the votes on failed bills to obtain more preferred outcomes. All in all, though, the conclusion we must draw from these findings is the same we drew from our analysis of vote margins. Constitutional bills approved by the RCPD were less favorable to the Speaker, and more favorable to the pivotal vote:r;, than posited by the Czar Rule model. .i 32 As indicated earlier, the substantial amount of amendment activity that occurred in the RCPD was difficult to assess; that any occurred was contrary to the predictions of the Czar Rule model, but almost all successful amendments were sponsored by the Editorial Committee-a group widely regarded as a tool of the Speaker. We now take another, closer look at Editorial Committee amendments by comparing the cutpoints for the bills that were approved after being amended by the Committee with the cutpoints of the previously failed bills that they replaced. As the entries ill Table 7 reveal, in every case the effect of Editorial Committee amendments was to move the cutpoint from a relatively moderate, interior position to a more extreme one. What this means is that Committee amendments produced outcomes that were more palatable to the pivotal voter and, necessarily, less to the liking of the Speaker, than the bill that was initially proposed. Table 7 about here In laying out the model we had suggested several reasons why the Speaker might have made proposals that were farther away from his own ideal point and closer to that of the pivotal voter than the Czar Rule model would predict. At this juncture, however, none of these factors are very compelling explanations for the data. Above all, the consequences of failing to secure passage of a bill do not appear to be dire enough to justify much risk aversion. The rules gave the Speaker great leverage over the amendment process. Our findings, furthermore, indicate that constitutional bills that were amended by the Editorial Committee after failing initially probably drove the pivotal voter closer to his indifference point than the bills that were accepted without amendment. Nor does uncertainty seem to have played an important role in the Speaker's strategy. The hundreds of roll calls taken in the RCPD should have revealed most information about preferences, and what variation there was in turnout had little impact upon the location of the pivotal voters. What, then, was the major impediment to Czar Rule in the RCPD? We think that it was the same factor, ironically, that made turnout matter so little-the large cluster of deputies with extremely similar NOMINATE scores in proximity to the 33 pivotal voter. Similar NOMINATE scores result from having similar voting records. It is thus much more accurate to speak of large, pivotal blocs than of individual pivotal voters. Most of the time it was simply not feasible for the Speaker to obtain the support of the pivotal voter for a measure without also bringing along several dozen other votes in excess of the number required. As a consequence, the key strategy ascribed to the Speaker by the Czar Rule model (making proposals that the pivotal voter just barely preferred to the status quo) was difficult to carry out. It is likely that the nature of the constitutional legislation that was at stake in the RCPD further degraded the Speaker's ability to "fine tune" proposals. Romer and Rosenthal's setter model was developed in the context of referenda on local school district funding. In such a context the agenda-setter can make very fine gradations in presenting proposals, e.g., between a tax rate of 40 mills versus 45. In contrast, the constitutional questions considered by the RCPD included such issues as what to call the country, how much power of review to grant to the constitutional court, and whether or not to allow young men eligible for the draft to become conscientious objectors. Such issues make for an issue space that is quite lumpy and discrete. Conclusion Was the Russian Congress of People's Deputies characterized by Czar Rule? The structure of the RCPD and the rule governing its deliberations certainly made this a live possibility. The Speaker of the RCPD was simultaneously Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and of the Presidium, the "inner parliaments" from which came proposals to amend the constitution and most other major legislation. Passage of constitutional matters required approval by two-thirds of the elected membership, and, most importantly, amendments to bills accepted "as background" required the same supermajority. These rules put the initial proposals presented by the Speaker to the RCPD in an especially privileged position. After bills were presented to the RCPD, the Speaker collected all proposed amendments, determined the order in which they would be considered, and could call for a final vote at any time. In conjunction 34 with his use of the Editorial Committee, this provided considerable assurance to the Speaker that the amendment process would not veer out of control. The model of Czar Rule we developed derives some support from the fact that most constitutional proposals introduced by the Speaker were adopted by the RCPD without amendment, and from the fact that virtually all amendments that were approved by the RCPD originated with the Editorial Committee. On the other hand, the overly large margins by which they were adopted, as well as the extreme location of the cutpoints, are indicative of outcomes that are much more favorable to the pivotal voter, and less favorable to the Speaker, than predicted by the Czar Rule model. It is likely that several factors conspired to prevent the Speaker from taking greater advantage of his sweeping parliamentary powers. What we believe to be the major one, however, was the large cluster of deputies in the neighborhood of the pivotal voter-particularly the anti-reform two-thirds pivotal voter. The Speaker generally could not win the support of the pivotal voter without also gaining the assent of several dozen other deputies in excess of the number required for passage. This seriously undermined the Speaker's ability to make proposals that the pivotal voter just barely preferred to the status quo -the key element of Czar Rule. The real problem facing reformers in the RCPD, then, was not a dominating Speaker intent on undermining the Yeltsin presidency (though this may have been Khasbulatov's objective). It was instead the fact that in most cases the location of the status quo put the (two-thirds) pivotal voter squarely in the anti-reformist camp. Scammon and Wattenberg (1970) argue that great insight into American politics can be had by observing that the median voter is a white, 47-year-old wife of a machinist from the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. By our reckoning, the two-thirds pivotal voter in the RCPD was a male, ethnic Russian, 56-year-old chairman of a large collective farm in Bryansk Oblast. And, as we have just argued, winning the assent of the pivotal voter usually required winning over several dozen other like-minded deputies. The struggle that took place in the RCPD, then, was not between personalities, nor the consequence of a serious flaw in constitutional design. It was instead a 35 battle over the fundamental direction of public policy in Russia. There was thus no reason to believe that the conflict between supporters and opponents of marketoriented reforms would fade away with the demise of the RCPD, and indeed it has not. As documented by Remington and Smith (1994), voting patterns in the Duma, the successor to the RCPD, display the same division between those favoring and those opposing continuing political and economic reforms. Finally, our findings concerning the RCPD are consistent with those of Jones' (1968) regarding the nature of Czar Rule in the late nineteenth-century U.S. Congress. He concludes that the putative power of Boss Reed rested not upon the factors to which it was generally attributed-his mastery of parliamentarianism, his rapier wit, or his commanding physical presence. It rested instead upon the reliable backing of a large, cohesive Republican majority. When that majority disappeared, so did Czar Rule. 36 Table 1: Ideological Tendencies of Fractions in the Sixth Congress Fraction Average Average Factor No NOMINATE Analysis Confidence Scores Scores Vote Radical Democrats -.45 -1.2 -86 Democratic Russia -.23 -1.1 -74 Non-party Members -.16 -1.1 -68 Left Center -.16 -0.8 -71 Freedom Russia -.09 -0.6 -61 Union of Russian Workers .01 -0.7 -22 Civic Society .05 -0.8 New Generation .16 -0.7 -20 Industrial Union .20 0.3 +1 Sovereignty and Equality .20 0.6 -13 Russia .35 0.6 +52 Agrarian Union .39 0.8 +72 Homeland .39 1.0 +62 Communists of Russia .54 1.0 +80 37 Table 2: Location of Key Actors' Ideal Points Congress Fourth Sixth Speaker -.39 -.17 Pivotal voters ("average" turnout) -.50, .45 -.29, .50 Pivotal voters ("reliable" turnout) -.51, .49 -.34, .55 " ·t . I 38 Table 3: Consideration of Constitutional Bills in the RCPD Fourth Congress Sixth Congress Constitutional Bills Introduced 24 60 Bills Subject to Amendment 22 28 Bills Successfully Amended 11 18 Number of Amendments 112 75 Number of Successful Amendments 15 23 21 55 Bills Approved-···- .. 39 Table 4: Fate of Amendments to Constitutional Bills Congress Fourth Sixth Amendments Sponsored By Deputees 100 57 Number Successful 3 6 Amendments Sponsored By the Editorial Committee 12 18 Number Successful 12 17 40 Table 5: Approval Margins for Constitutional Bills Fourth Congress Sixth Congress Sixth Congress (EC) ::; 70 2 10 7 71-75 6 10 5 76-80 11 18 2 81-90 2 3 0 Total 21 41 14 ::; 80 0 0 0 81-85 0 4 4 86-90 6 7 4 91-95 11 24 6 96-100 4 6 0 Total 21 41 14 Percentage of Total Membership Percentage of Deputies Present 41 Table 6: Location of Cutpoints on Votes on Constitutional Bills Outpoint Location Fourth Congress Sixth Congress Sixth Congress (EC) -1.00, ... ,-.90 1 1 0 -.89, ... ,-.80 0 0 0 -.79, ... ,-.70 0 2 0 -.69, ... ,-.60 0 1 2 -.59, ... ,-.50 0 3 1 -.49, ... ,-.40 0 2 1 -.39, ... ,-.30 0 1 0 -.29, ... ,-.20 0 0 0 -.19, ... ,-.10 0 0 0 -.09, ... ,.00 0 0 0 .01, ... ,.10 0 0 0 .11, ... ,.20 0 0 0 .21, ... ,.30 0 0 0 .31, ... ,.40 0 0 0 .41, ... ,.50 0 0 0 .51, ... ,.60 1 1 1 .61, ... ,.70 1 3 3 .71, ... ,.80 2 5 2 .81, ... ,.90 1 3 2 .. 91, ... ,1.00 15 19 2 Total 21 41 14 42 Table 7: The Effect of Editorial Committee Behavior in the Sixth Congress Bill Number Outpoint, Failed Bill Outpoint, Accepted Bill 1 .33 .86 2 -.29 -.68 3 .40 .61 4 -.14 -.60 5 .51,.49 1.00 6 -.31 -.47 7 .06 -.55 8 .44 .57 9 .24 .72 10 .28,.26 61 11 .07,.49 .96 12 .48 .75 13 .49 .67 14 .16,.56 .88 43 Figure I Status Quo Left of the Core One-third pivotal voter's utility function c2 -1 The Speaker can attain any point inside the interval [ c1 ;r I{Ef)] ·.I . I +1 44 Figure 2 Status Quo to the Right of the Core 2/3 pivotal voter's utility function -1 c1 The Speaker can attain any point inside the interval [rr (EPh c2 J 45 Figure 3 Deputies' NOMINATE Scores, Fourth Congress 100 80 ..... t- = 60 - - ,_ f/l CD ,__ •.-! ~ Qi CD ,_ ,_ ,..... - ,_ I- ..... ,_ I- ,_ t- t- I- t- ~ .._ ........ - - - 0.5 0.7 0 c.i-. 0 40 ~ - ..... I- I- I- t- I- t- - ..... - - CD ] 20 I- I- I- z= 0 1-f-0.9 -0.7 -0.5 -0.3 -0.1 I- -0.8 I- -0.6 '- -0.4 '- '- -0.2 ....._ I- '- '- 0.1 0 0.3 0.2 0.4 0.6 I- •I 0.9 0.8 46 Figure 4 Deputies' NOMINATE Scores, Sixth Congress 140 120 100 tr.J Q) •.-4 +;I C4 = 80 Q) Q 60 14-1 0 ~ Q) 40 ..c 8 20 z= 0 -0.9 -0.7 -0.5 -0.3 -0.1 0.1 0.3 0.5 0.7 0.9 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 47 Chapter 3 The Russian Electorate Between 1991 and 1995 Introduction The results of Russia's December 1993 parliamentary election, judged by most observers as an upset victory for the ultra-nationalist party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and of the December 1995 contest in which Communists gained the upper hand in the State Duma, prompted a good deal of speculation about the stability of the Russian electorate, its commitment to reform, and the viability of Russia's infant democratic institutions. Indeed, it seemed inconceivable that four years or so of declining economic output and life expectancy, rising crime, and a civil war in the Caucasus would leave people as hospitable to reform as they appeared to be in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin first ascended to the presidency. The chief concern is that electoral trends signal a fundamental shift in attitudes away from the euphoria of the late 1980's and early 1990's so that, in the likely event that the Russian economy experiences only a gradual and painful ascent that leaves much of the population impoverished for the foreseeable future and that the war in the Caucasus must necessarily entail increased sacrifice and cost, any optimism about the future of Russian democracy and reform seems wholly inappropriate. Of course, we cannot discount the possibility that vote counts are seriously contaminated as a rule by widespread fraud (Myagkov and Sobyanin 1995). After all, Russian democracy is a mere five years old, and Stalinist rules for administering elections still apply in many regions; how else do we explain turnout rates in some conservative and remote voting districts that remain above 95 percent? Nor should we discount the possibility that Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov's successes derived as much from superior campaign tactics and an ability to appeal to voter aspirations as from 48 any disenchantment with reform and democracy. We suspect, in fact, that Gaidar as poster boy of a party with the platform of "macro-economic stability" would hardly attract voters in the West any more than he captured the imagination of Russia's electorate; nor should we suppose that the image of Viktor Chernomyrdin promising, in effect, more of the same, would inspire voters in any electorate. However, it is folly to assume that those returns contain no information about preferences, that they are wholly contaminated by fraud, or that they are the mere consequence of campaign rhetoric. They are, after all, largely consistent with objective economic circumstances. Here, then, abiding by the same assumption made implicitly by those who offer their assessments of the ebb and fl.ow of Russian democracy, we treat election statistics at face value. The questions we address here, moreover, are not much different from the ones that concern earlier analyses. We ask whether a significant part of the Russian electorate is growing weary of Yeltsin, democracy and reform and whether there is evidence that the electorate is becoming increasingly polarized between reform and anti-reform positions. We want to know what share of those who stayed the course of reform through December 1993 (by voting either for, say, Gaidar or Yavlinsky), changed their opinions and voted Communist in 1995. We address the issue of the extent to which reformers damaged their electoral prospects more than Communists in 1995 by failing to unify under the banner of a single candidate. And we ask whether Yeltsin's 'party of power,' Our Home Is Russia, succeed in attracting voters from the center or whether it secured its 11 percent of the vote in 1995 primarily at the expense of those parties that championed reform in 1993. We understand that answers to such questions are, in principle at least, best learned from public opinion polls and in-depth surveys of people's attitudes and perceptions. Unfortunately, the usual problems associated with polling - sampling error, respondents unwilling to admit they didn't vote or that they voted for a loser, and an electorate uncertain of its preferences - are multiplied in Russia by the inaccessibility of significant parts of the electorate (those in remote rural regions), the non-existence of panel surveys extending across two or more elections, the uncertainties inherent 49 in an unstable multiparty system in which few voters are familiar with all but a small handful of parties, and by respondents who often seem more inclined to answer "don't know" than to give any other response. Unsurprisingly, then, most analyses of electoral trends as well as nearly all journalistic interpretations of events are based on official aggregate election returns and, with respect to the parliamentary contests, on the share of Duma seats won by one party's list or another. In this respect, perhaps the most thoughtful assessment of electoral trends is McFaul's (1996) recent analysis in which he concludes that although there are no radical shifts from left to right or vice-versa within the electorate, Russian voters are becoming increasingly and dangerously polarized between reform and anti-reform positions. McFaul's analysis is in fact the starting point for our own, and so we summarize it here in the form of a set of testable hypotheses, the most important of which are the following: Hl: "despite the presence of 43 parties [in December 1995] ... Russian party politics is still essentially bipolar" (p. 94). H2: "there has been little change in the balance of support between [reform and anti-reform] camps" (p. 94). H3: "the 1995 results do not signal a radical shift away from Zhirinovsky-style 'na- tionalism' and a strong move toward 'communism"' (p. 94). H4: "many centrist voters from 1993 voted for the q_pposition in 1995 ... [but] "the core opposition parties from 1993 (Communists, LDPR, and Agrarians) did not benefit from this centrist migration ... 'new' votes for the opposition parties went to ... radical communists [Anpilov] and the new nationalist parties like Alexandr Le bed's CRC, Alexandr Rutskoi's Derzhava, and Power to the People" (p. 95). H5: "the opposition received a big boost from the return of the three million radical communist voters who had mostly boycotted the 1993 elections ... [and] voted primarily for Anpilov's Working Russia" (p. 9·5) . . I ... " 50 H6: The success of Our Home Is Russia "came at the expense of [Russia's Choice]" (p. 98). H7: "Party proliferation within the reformist camp ... dramatically weakened the representation of reformists within the Duma" (p. 98). Like previous assessments, McFaul's analysis and these seven hypotheses are based primarily on an informed assessment of national aggregate returns and, with the exception of hypothesis H5, on the breakdown of support among those who voted. In a sense, then, these seven hypotheses are based on but two observations - the national aggregate results of the 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, elections returns at this level of aggregation cannot provide sufficient data for definitive conclusions: there are too many variables (possible shifts in voter loyalties) and too few observations (percentages of the vote received by the different parties). Put simply, there is an inherent mathematical indeterminacy in the results. This is not to say that McFaul's scenario is incorrect, but only that it is not the only possibility consistent with aggregate national returns. In this essay, then, we reconsider these hypotheses using data aggregated only to the level of individual rayons drawn from all Russian elections since 1991. Since we are thereby able to operate with as many as approximately 2,000 observations 1 per election, we can reduce considerably the number of logically admissible scenarios. An additional problem with most interpretations of official returns is that conclusions typically rely on a classification of parties into reform, anti-reform, and centrist blocks. Unfortunately, parties and candidates do not come with ready-made reformist and anti-reformist labels, and the details of any such classification can be manipulated to admit a variety of alternative conclusions. For example, how do we classify, say, Women of Russia in 1993 and 1995? If we look at the legislative voting records of Duma deputies elected under their list and classify the party as centrist, we still do not know if this is the view voters held of them, nor will national aggregate returns tell us who secured the votes they lost in 1995. Should we classify Shakrai's Party 1 The numbers of observations vary from 1003 for the 1993 elections to 2195 for the 1995 elections. 51 of Unity and Accord as reformist or centrist? Although Shakrai himself is associated with reform, several deputies elected under his party's label in 1993 ran unsuccessfully on Rybkin's stillborn party list in 1995, which was originally intended to appeal to right-of-center voters. Although we might agree that Our Home Is Russia belongs in the same category as Russia's Choice since each, in their time, drew largely upon Yeltsin's presidential resources, can we safely assume that each secured their votes from the same pool of voters or did Our Home Is Russia win a significant share of its votes from parties we might classify as centrist in 1993? And what do we do with the LDPR? Is it anti-reform or should we, on the basis of Zhirinovsky's legislative record of compromise, place it in its own category - pro-reform but anti-government? Of course, classification is required whenever we try to say whether the electorate is becoming more or less conservative. But here we focus on the source of support of the various parties, candidates and referenda options that appeared on ballots so that any classifications we intended only to help interpret our more formal statistical analysis. Finally, answering questions about electoral stability and preference is complicated also by the fact that turnout and the percentage of invalid ballots varies greatly from one election to the next. Officially, turnout declined steadily from 1991 to December 1993 (75.4 percent in March 1991, 74.7 percent in June 1991, 64.3 percent in April 1993, and 54.8 percent in December 1993) but rose sharply again in December 1995 to 63.2 percent. Similarly, the percentage of the electorate casting invalid or blank ballots when voting for party lists rose to 7.62 percent in December 1993, but declined to a historically more normal level (less than two percent) in 1995. Who cast invalid ballots in 1993, who lost votes as turnout declined, and who gained them in 1995 when turnout reversed its trend? More importantly, is there evidence that parts of the electorate are becoming increasingly disenchanted with reform and Yeltsin but, instead of shifting directly from pro-reform to anti-reform positions, the disenchanted first become indifferent to all parties and positions and register their dissatisfaction by staying home? Thus, rather than ignore variations in turnout and the number of invalid ballots, here we examine closely who failed to vote or voted improperly in 52 1993 and who returned to the polls in 1995. Thus, using data more disaggregated than was available to earlier analysts, imposing no specific classification of parties, and accommodating changes in turnout, this essay offers a reconsideration of McFaul's seven hypotheses and the general scenario he offers as a description of the Russian electorate. Briefly, we sustain the first hypothesis concerning the stability of that electorate and conclude that if there is any instability it lies in two places: in the vote Zhirinovsky received in 1993, a significant share of which supported reformist positions in 1991 and April 1993, and which (in accordance with hypothesis H4) moved to support communist parties in 1995; and in the changing patterns of non-voting and invalid ballots. Although the data supports Hypothesis H5 that Anpilov's party gained from increased turnout in 1995, it also reveals that the Communist Party was the biggest net beneficiary. And although we agree in part with hypothesis H6 that many of the lost votes of Russia's Choice went to Our Home Is Russia and, in accordance with H7, to other unsuccessful reformist parties, Our Home Is Russia gained as well from increased turnout, although not as much as the Communists. Trends in turnout also cause us to question hypothesis H2, in that between 1991 and December 1993, much of the votes lost to nonvoting came from reformist positions. The most curious and, perhaps, suspicious finding (at least with respect to allegations of fraud in December 1993) is that, rather than being spread uniformly across party lists, virtually all voters who cast invalid ballots in 1993 voted in 1995 for the Communist Party, the LDPR, and Our Home Is Russia. In reaching these conclusions and in offering other refinements of hypotheses Hl through H7, this chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a brief history of the elections that concern us, describes our data, and discusses our methodology. Section 3 discusses our primary results about the movement of voters for three pairs of elections: June 1991 (the first presidential contest) versus the April 1993 referendum, April 1993 versus the December 1993 parliamentary election, and December 1993 versus December 1995. To gain a better overview of the electorate across Yeltsin's tenure in office, Section 4 considers two non-adjacent pairs of elections - the flow of votes between 1991 and December 1993 and between 1991 and December 1995 - 53 and concludes with an examination of potential differences between urban and rural voters. History, Data, and Methods Before describing our data it is useful to first summarize the basic changes that occurred across the four elections that concern us - the June 1991 presidential election, the April 1993 referendum, the December 1993 parliamentary election and constitutional referendum, and the December 1995 parliamentary election. Briefly, the June 1991 election was the first popular balloting for president in Russian history, at which time the unique personality associated with reform and opposition to the existing regime was Boris Yeltsin, then Speaker of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies. His opposite number was Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former USSR prime minister, who, as a nominee of the Communist Party, was widely viewed as a representative of the status quo. Zhirinovsky, in contrast, although positioning himself as an antiwestern ultra-nationalist, was not presumed to be opposed to reform or portrayed as a stand-in for any status quo. The remaining candidates were General Albert Makashov, USSR Minister of the Interior and future KGB director Vladimir Bakatin, and the communist governor of Kemerovo oblast, Aman Tuleev. Despite Bakatin's subsequent attempt to liberalize the KGB, all three of these candidates can be put into the anti-reformist camp, or at least the camp opposed to Yeltsin's then widely publicized opposition to the existing regime. Table 1 shows the results of this election and, with 45.6 million voters supporting Yeltsin, establishes the high water mark of his support, and, presumably, of enthusiasm for democratic market reform. The April 1993 referendum was called jointly by the President and the Congress of People's Deputies as part of their ongoing power struggle. Voters were asked four questions, three of which concerned confidence in Yeltsin and his economic policy, and the fourth asking about the advisability of holding early elections for a new Congress. Contrasting the outcome of the referendum (see Table 1), note first the sharp drop in turnout, from 74.7 percent to 64.2 percent. Second, although a clear majority 54 answers 'yes' to the first question on the ballot - the question most clearly directed at gauging confidence in Yeltsin - the absolute number of Yeltsin supporters declines from 45.6 million in 1991 to 40.4 million in 1993. Thus we can ask: did Yeltsin's 'missing' 5.2 million voters defect to other, explicitly anti-reformist positions, or did they merely stay home and contribute to a growing pool of non-voters? The third measure of the electorate's mood occurred in December 1993. This election included a referendum on a new constitution as well as the choice of deputies to Russia's upper legislative chamber, the Federation Council. But because not only Yeltsin but Zhirinovsky urged voters to approve the constitution and because most candidates for the Council ran without party labels, perhaps the most interpretable assessment of voter preferences occurred with respect to the party-list voting to fill seats in the new State Duma. Table 1 summarizes the election outcome with respect to the 13 parties on the ballot as well as the number of votes cast against all parties, the number of invalid ballots, turnout, and the 'for' and 'against' vote on the constitution. Notice first that turnout continues its decline, from 64.3 percent in April to 54.8 percent. Second, even if we classify only the Communist, Agrarian, and Zhirinovsky parties as explicitly 'anti-Yeltsin,' Yeltsin's support, like turnout, declines as well from 40.4 million voters in April to 34.1 million in December. However, confounding any simple assessment of who gained what from where is the fact that the number of voters who voted against Yeltsin in April and in support of the old Congress (the estimated 21.2 million who voted No on the first question and No on the fourth) far exceeds the number who supported the Communist or Agrarian parties (11.0 million) in December. Finally, we should also take note of the sharp increase in the number of invalid ballots - from L5 million to 4.4 million. Since turnout is declining as well, the question naturally arises about the political sympathies of these ostensibly incompetent or confused voters. Russia's most recent parliamentary election, in December 1995, offered voters a choice of 43 parties, and, with a significant cluster of ostensibly pro and anti-reform parties garnering votes in the three to five percent range, only four parties surpassed the five percent threshold and won seats on the party-list half of the contest (see 55 Table 1). 1 The most notable 'success' was scored by the Communist party, which more than doubled the vote it and its fellow traveller, the Agrarians, received in 1993. In contrast, Russia's Choice virtually disappeared from view and Zhirinovsky lost half of his support. But aside from these well publicized outcomes, we can find other patterns that warrant attention. First, turnout increases substantially, from 54.8 percent to 64.4 percent, while the share of invalid ballots decreases to 'more normal' levels to 1.3 million ballots from 4.4 million in 1993. Second, although a new 'reform' or pro-government party appeared on the scene, Our Home Is Russia, and was credited with taking votes away from Russia's Choice, its vote share cannot account fully for the losses incurred by that party _and by those others we might classify as centrist in 1993, such as Women of Russia, Travkin's Democratic Russia, and Shakrai's Party of Unity and Accord. Finding meaningful trends in this electoral sequence is not difficult, but as we note earlier, the trends we find will depend on which parties we label pro-reform, anti-reform, and centrist. Thus, to better assess the mood of the electorate, we look instead at each party or candidate's source of support. Saying, for instance, that Russians are more anti-reform today than two or four years ago or that sfgnificant numbers are tiring of reform requires finding a measurable part of the electorate moving across the ideological spectrum from left to right. Similarly, the argument that Zhirinovsky's vote in 1993 was an anti-reform prc;>test vote that Yeltsin is unlikely to capture in the June 1996 presidential election requires explicit confirmation of the hypothesis that a predominant share of the votes ne,. lost in 1995 went to, say, the Communists. However, mere 'declassification' of parties cannot resolve matters; as we also indicate earlier, we must disaggregate our data. Here, then, we consider data aggregated only to the level of individual rayons. The Russian Federation consists of 89 semi-autonomous regions (oblasts, krays, republics, autonomous regions, and the federal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg), and each region, in turn, consists of a number of '~rayons." The average region has a population of about two million (exceptions are .the city of Moscow and some of the sparsely populated northern oblasts), whereas the average rayon has a population . i ,. '' 56 of less than a hundred thousand. Typically, each region's capital is a large city with a population that ranges between several hundred thousands to several million and may itself consist of several rayons. The administrative capital of each rayon (excepting those that are part of a regional capital) is generally a small town with a population ranging from several thousand to several hundred thousand. There are, then, several alternative levels of aggregation of the data - rayon, region, Duma district (after December 1993) or the whole country - but until December 1995, the only official results were aggregated at the national level, whereas the Central Election Commission, following the December 1995 vote, published data at the rayon level. However, through a variety of sources (generally representatives of the Russia's Choice, who in most cases worked directly with local administration officials), we have obtained 'unofficial' returns aggregated at the rayon level for the first three elections in our study. Although not covering all of Russia, our data appears nevertheless to be representative of the whole in that no category of return varies from official numbers (national aggregate totals) by more than two percent. Hence, it is this data plus the official rayon-level returns for December 1995 that is the basis of this study. The data set for the June 1991 presidential elections is, with the exception of 1995, the most comprehensive one in our study. It consists of 2551 rayon-level observations, covers 87 of 89 regions, and accounts for 105. 7 million of the 107 million people who formed the eligible electorate. The two missing regions are the autonomous republics located on the far north of Russia. The data set includes voting totals for all of the six candidates as well as turnout rates, and the number of votes against all of the candidates and the number of invalid and unused ballots. Data for the April 1993 referendum take the form of 2125 observations covering 68 of 89 regions and about 91.1 million eligible voters (about 90 percent of the total). This data set includes vote counts for all but one oblast but none of the republics. The December 1993 election is the most difficult to document, since the Central Election Commission to this day refuses to publish official rayon-level returns. Inexplicably, the bottom line, as asserted by the Commission's chair, is that such data does not exist. Our data set here, then, comes from a variety of different sources and includes 1298 rayon- 57 level observations for voting on the constitution and 1167 rayon-level observations for voting on party-lists. The constitutional data set covers 41 regions and about 52.9 million eligible voters, whereas the party-list data set includes 36 regions and about 48.2 million eligible voters. Most of the missing regions are the autonomous republics, the southern oblasts and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite these gaps, this data set appears to be fairly representative of the country as a whole - the share of votes given to the constitution and to the several major parties does not differ from the officially reported national average by more than two percent. Finally, the December 1995 election returns have been published by the Central Election Commission, and include all rayons and regions. 2 Turning now to our method of analysis, suppose by way of example that two parties, A and B, compete against each other in two consecutive elections, e = 1 and 2. Let the percentage of the eligible electorate voting for the two parties in each election be denoted by x: and x~, and let x~ denote the share of the electorate that failed to vote. Suppose now that party A lost votes, that B gained votes, and that the number of nonvoters decreased so that B's gain actually exceeds A's loss. Since there are only two parties, it is not too difficult to interpret these numbers, but even still such aggregate numbers allow for an infinity of possibilities when it comes to describing the flows of voters and nonvoters. For example, B's increase might have come directly from A's voters in the previous election, as well as from the ranks of nonvoters; alternatively, B's new support might have come exclusively from old nonvoters, with a larger share of A's lost vote going into the ranks of nonvoters. Although both possibilities yield the same outcome, they present different interpretations of the outcome. If, in the first instance, the espoused ideologies of A and B differ radically, we would infer a somewhat unstable electorate in which voters switch from one extreme to the other, whereas in the second case we see fewer voters jumping across the ideological spectrum and more of them, when switching loyalties, first becoming indifferent between the parties. To see, then, how we might disentangle these possibilities using aggregate data, let us focus first on A's supporters in the second election and, to render the parameters we 58 must estimate identifiable, let us assume that any increased turnout comes exclusively from the ranks of previous nonvoters. What we want to learn, now, is the percentage of voters who supported A in both elections, the percentage if any who voted for party B in the first election but switched to A in the second, and, assuming that turnout increased from one election to the next, the percentage who abstained from voting in the first election but voted for A in the second. Formally, then, we are interested in estimating the coefficients a1, a~, and a~ of the following equation: Notice that this expression subtracts the share of the electorate that abstains in both elections. Since our example assumes that turnout increased, and since to render our model identifiable we must assume that anyone who voted in the first election voted as well in the second, we treat new voters as a separate party - as a part of the electorate that 'voted' not to vote in the first election. Unfortunately, no econometric method guarantees unbiased estimates of the variables in this model (King 1996). The primary difficulty is aggregation error, which arises whenever people in one observation act differently than people in some other. Nevertheless, we can estimate the elasticities of the coefficients if we accept the same assumptions that are implicit in any attempt, journalistic or otherwise, to infer substantive meaning from aggregate election returns. Specifically, we must assume that the value of coefficients do not vary across observations (or equivalently, across any subset of observations) and that our independent variables do not correlate significantly. Now notice that since xf +xf +x~ = 100, or, equivalently, since x~ =.100 - xf- xf, 59 we can rewrite that expression as Thus, the elasticities of xf, xf, and x~, respectively, are a1 + K, a~+ K, and K. 3 Suppose now that we have estimates of our coefficients and we ask: what inferences can we make about individual decisions. Naturally, if the model's assumptions are not satisfied - if aggregation error biases or otherwise renders our estimates meaningless - the answer is 'nothing'. But notice that there are several checks on the consistency of those estimates. First, the estimated coefficients should not sum to a number significantly different from 1.0, since presumably supporters of A, B, and nonvoters exhaust the potential electorate (excluding 'hard core' nonvoters). Second, no individual coefficient should be significantly less than zero or greater than 1. Finally, we need to check the assumption that coefficients do not vary from one region to another. The particular danger here is aggregation error - estimates, for instance, that are, say, significant within various subpopulations but insignificant when the entire data set is considered. The usual method here is to divide our sample into various subpopulations - subpopulations that are most likely to occasion different values for the coefficients. In the case of Russia, the most likely candidate is the divide between urban and rural populations, since there is considerable evidence that urban voters, owing to differences in information, education, and economic opportunities, respond differently to the parties than do rural voters (see Hough et al. 1996, Clem and Craumer 1993, 1995, and Slider et al. 1994).4 Hence, in the last section of this essay, we divide our data into 'urban' and 'non-urban' subpopulations and rerun several of our regressions to see if at least our qualitative conclusions are affected. To see now how we can interpret our estimates, suppose for purpose of an example that we estimate a1+Kat0.7. In this case we would infer that if party A's support increases in the first election by one percent, then A's support in the second election should increase by .7 percent. An equivalent interpretation is that 70 percent of those who voted for A in the first election voted for A in the second. The caution that needs 60 to be applied here about either interpretation, though, is that if A's vote in the first election averaged, say, 40 percent, it is not necessarily the case that supporters in a district that gave him a mere 10 percent acted the same as supporters in one that gave him precisely 40 percent or the same as voters in a district that gave him 90 percent. Our model is linear and, especially when treating variables constrained to values between 0 and 100 percent, it may not be true that extreme cases are like average ones. Notice now that our regressions delete one party, candidate, or referendum response and allow its coefficient to be estimated by the constant term. We do this since, if all possible choices (including not voting and casting an invalid ballot) are included, our variables sum to 100 percent and our independent variables are linearly dependent. But in deleting a variable, we must delete a 'significant' one whose support does in fact vary across observations, since otherwise, our remaining variables will be approximately linearly dependent, and our estimates correspondingly unreliable. Some care, though, must be taken when choosing which variable to delete. If we delete one that bears a strong negative correlation to one that remains in the sample, then the mathematics of regression analysis tell us that some of our estimates will be strongly biased downwards. We should note here, however, that these problems do not generally arise here unless there are a 'great many' independent variables, which is to say that they tend to arise only when we examine the relationship between party list voting in the December 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections. Results Since we want to learn how voters who supported, say, reform, act subsequently, our dependent variables pertains to choices made in the second (most recent) election in the pair, and independent variables concern choices made in the first election. However, since the methodology is limited by the level of aggregation of our data and allows only estimates of the fl.ow of votes, we must focus on the "major" issues, such as support and opposition to reform, and primary candidates or parties. Thus, we do 61 not attempt to estimate the sources of support of a party that gathers a mere one or two percent of the vote; in these instances we group minor parties together according to a priori judgments about their ideological persuasions. Turning first to the analysis of the fl.ow of votes between June 1991 and April 1993, we first divide the set of 1991 presidential candidates into four groups: Yeltsin, Ryzhkov, Zhirinovsky, and 'others'. The first thing we want to measure is the extent to which Yeltsin's supporters in 1991 supported him in April 1993 by answering Yes to the referendum's first question. In addition, we also want to see who was hurt most be the decline in turnout between these two elections. Thus, an additional dependent variable is the percentage of the electorate choosing not to vote in each rayon in April 1993 minus the percentage who did not vote in 1991. The data in Table 2 show the results of our regressions, and presents our results in two forms. 5 Looking first at the column under 'Yeltsin', the first number tells us that of those who voted for Yeltsin in 1991, 73 percent voted Yes on the first referendum question, 8 percent voted No, and 18 percent failed to vote. The second number in parentheses tells us that of those who voted Yes in our data, 42.29 percent - or fully four-fifths came from people who voted for Yeltsin in 1991. In contrast, 87· percent of Ryzhkov's supporters in 1991 voted No and accounted for nearly one half the No vote in April. Zhirinovsky's voters and those who voted for other candidates, on the other hand, tended to split nearly evenly between v9ting Yes and No, with an edge given to an anti-Yeltsin vote of No. This is our first indication (but not our last) that we cannot easily characterize Zhirinovsky's base of Sl].pport vis-a-vis their attitudes toward reform. 6 Of the things Table 2 reveals, two warrant emphasis. First, note the stability of that part of the electorate polarized between pro and anti-Yeltsin positions. Our estimates suggest that few members of the electorate - less than six percent of those who voted in 1991 - switched from a pro-Yeltsin vote in 1991 to a No vote in 1993 or from a pro-regime (Ryzhkov) vote in 1991 to a Yes . vote in 1993. In this respect at least, the bipolarity McFaul infers with respect to t~e electorate between December 1993 and 1995 (see hypothesis Hl) is not peculiar to those parliamentary contests; 62 a core of polarized voters appear to exist as early as 1991. If any fundamental shift occurred, it occurred within the pro-Yeltsin camp as nearly one-sixth of Yeltsin's earlier support disappeared into the ranks of nonvoters. If people were less enthusiastic about reform in April 1993, their moderated enthusiasm did not lead them to switch sides but led instead to growing indifference between both polar positions. Conversely, few of Ryzhkov or Zhirinovsky's voters in 1991 stayed home in April 1993. As a consequence, Yeltsin's support in 1991 of nearly 58 percent fades in April 1993 to a bare majority. Turning next to the Russian electorate between April and December 1993 - to the elections that bracket Yeltsin's coup against the old Congress - we now let responses to the April referendum's first question correspond to our independent variables, and for dependent variables we consider both the constitutional referendum and voting on the party list elections to the State Duma. 7 Because turnout continued its decline we identify "nonvoters in December who voted in April" as a separate dependent variable, and since December also witnessed a sharp increase in the numbers of invalid ballots, we also create the category "voters who cast valid ballots in April but invalid ones in December" as an additional dependent variable to be explored. Table 3 summarizes the results of our regressions and reveals several patterns that correspond to what we already know about the December election. Perhaps most importantly, though, although few (four percent) of Yeltsin's April supporters appear to have opposed his constitution, the share of those who voted in April and supporting reform in December by voting for the constitution or for parties we might reasonably classify as reformist or centrist continues to decline as additional Yes voters from April enter the ranks of nonvoters. By our estimate, fully one quarter of those who voted Yes in April failed to appear at the polls in December. In contrast, although nearly one-fifth of those voting No in April voted for the constitution, little (two percent) of that opposition to Yeltsin's chose not to vote in December. Thus, the progressive 'bleeding' of reformers into the ranks of abstainers, which began in April, continues and perhaps even accelerates in December. Aside from this erosion and despite the events of September and October, the bipolar stability that we observe in Table 3 63 and that corresponds to McFaul's first hypothesis is maintained: Of those supporting the constitution, 85 percent supported Yeltsin in April whereas among those voting against the constitution, fully 92 percent opposed Yeltsin in April. Overall, then, although it appears that few voters crossed over in their preferences, Yeltsin's support declines from a bare majority in April to something just above 41 percent in December. Looking now at voting for the party lists, the division of April Yes and No voters offers few surprises: votes for Russia's Choice and Yabloko come exclusively from those who voted Yes in April whereas votes for Communist and Agrarian parties come exclusively from those who voted No. Women of Russia and Travkin's DPR, true perhaps to the 'centrist' label often given them, derive their support from both Yes and No voters, although since there are more Yes than No voters, their support comes predominantly from Yes voters. Shakrai's list and those of the parties that failed to surpass the five percent threshold secure votes primarily from Yes voters. Finally, just as Zhirinovsky's 1991 voters divided approximately 1:2 against Yeltsin in April, support for the LDPR in December comes from both pro and anti-Yeltsin camps in approximately the same ratio. Once again, then, we cannot put the LDPR into the same opposition and anti-reform category as we might place Communists and Agrarians. Perhaps the most interesting question about December concerns Zhirinovsky's vote. The numbers in Table 3 suggest the following: if we assume that Zhirinovsky succeeded in keeping his 1991 voters, then approximately one quarter (3.12 percent of those who voted in April) of that additional support came from people who supported Yeltsin in April and three quarters (8.98 percent) came from No voters. This estimate, though, leaves unanswered the subsidiary question as to why Yes voters who defected from Yeltsin defected only to Zhirinovsky (as opposed to Communists or Agrarians). Myagkov and Sobyanin's (1995) answer is that this apparent defection (as well as an equal number from the No category) represents election fraud - ballots added to the total in order to increase turnout and render the constitutional referendum legitimate. Indeed, if we assume that 3.12 percent of those who voted Yes in April but for Zhirinovsky in December as well as 3.12 percent who voted No in April 64 but for Zhirinovsky as well are falsified ballots, we come to an estimate of fraud's magnitude (6.24 percent times an April turnout of 64.2 million = 4 million ballots falsified for Zhirinovsky) that is in the ball park of Sobyanin's (1995) initial estimate of 6.3 million. Admittedly, however, such speculations take us beyond the confines of our analysis, and the overall picture painted by Table 3 is of an electorate that continues to melt away from pro-reform positions into the ranks of nonvoters and the absence of crossovers between reform and anti-reform (communist) camps. Although McFaul formulates his seventh hypothesis about the impact of party proliferation for the December 1995 election, it applies here as well if we classify the five small parties that failed to qualify for seats as pro-reform, since they secured virtually all of their votes from those who voted Yes in April. Moreover, although Travkin's DPR and Women of Russia won votes from both Yes and No April voters, the plurality of Yes over No means that both parties secured a majority of their vote from Yes voters. The implication, then, is that if their Yes voters are like the rest, the presence of Women of Russia and DPR on the ballot also reduced the relative support recorded by Russia's Choice and Yabloko. On the other hand, had Zhirinovsky not been in the race, and if his Yes and No voters were polarized between pro and anti-reform positions like all the rest, elimination of the LDPR from the contest would have contributed more to Communist and Agrarian party totals than to any other. When we turn to the December 1995 parliamentary election we confront some new methodological problems that derive not only from the great number of parties that competed then (43), but also from the large number (13) that competed in December 1993. The specific problem is that our estimates become increasing unreliable to the extent that our independent variables (the support given to each party) are linearly dependent. In our case the set of all such variables, taken together, are dependent in that they must sum to 100 percent. However, recall that we delete one variable from each regression and allow its coefficient to be determined by the constant term. If this variable accounts for a 'significant' part of the eligible electorate and if it varies 'sufficiently' in the data, then multicolinearity is manageable. But if there are a many independent variables and if no one of them accounts for a significant 65 share of the vote or has support that fails to vary significantly across observations, multicolinearity re-emerges. Our approach here, then, is to first group the parties that competed in 1993 into four categories: the Communist Party plus Agrarians, Zhirinovsky's LDPR, centrist and reform (Travkin's DPR, Women of Russia, Russia's Choice, Yabloko, Shakrai's Unity and Accord, etc.), invalid ballots, and new voters. After ascertaining which groups contributed support to each significant party in 1995, we subdivide those groups and estimate each party's contribution within the group, but only after we re-cluster the groups that are not indicated as providing significant support by the first regression. Table 4, then, gives the results of our first pass at the data (since these estimates are preliminary, we do not offer any estimate in parentheses of the division of the full electorate across party lists). Notice the considerable increase in the number of coefficients estimated to be negative and significant - a sure sign that our positive estimates are biased upwards. Nevertheless, we do see in this table approximately the same pattern we saw earlier with respect to the bipolarity of the electorate. For example, of those that voted for 'Democrats, center parties, and against all' in 1993, none are indicated as voting for the LDPR, Communist or Agrarian parties, Anpilov or Rutskoi. Instead, their votes are spread out nearly uniformly across the remaining parties, including various clusters of parties that individually received only a small fraction of the vote. Conversely, those who voted for the Communist or Agrarian parties in 1993 voted much the same way in 1995. But notice here that this communist vote, although dissipated somewhat across five parties, concentrates itself in the Communist Party. Thus, although the communist vote is dissipated somewhat by the presence of Anpilov and Rutskoi on the ballot, it is far less uniform than the 'democratic and centrist' vote. McFaul's seventh hypothesis about the damage done to democrats by the proliferation of parties, then, is largely borne out by this preliminary analysis. Insofar as Zhirinovsky's lost support is concerned, Table 4 suggests that much of this support went to the Communist Party, with smaller shares going to Rutskoi, Anpilov, Lebed and Govorukin. The primary beneficiaries of the increased turnout are Yabloko, Derzhava, and the Communists. Thus, Table 4 at 66 least, fails to support for McFaul's fifth hypothesis about the basis of support for Anpilov's Working Russia. Finally, consider the column 'invalid ballots', which attempts to estimate the beneficiaries of the relative decline in the number of invalid ballots. Owing to the considerable number of statistically significant negative estimates, our positive estimates cannot be regarded as reliable; nevertheless, the suggestion here is that the primary beneficiaries of this decline were 'other democrats', Women of Russia, the LDPR, the Communist Party, Agrarians, and Anpilov. This is indeed a curious mix, but before we attempt any interpretation of things, let us turn to the refinement of our analysis in which we try to dissect further the basis of each party's support. Table 5 presents our results, except that here, rather than present a multitude of columns with statistically insignificant estimates, the last column reports only those estimates that are statistically significant for the parties we label 'Democrats and center' in Table 4 (as before, the numbers in parentheses denote the overall percentage of the vote given to parties from the 1993 electorate). Looking first at the first nine rows of this table, notice that Russia's Choice receives only about one quarter of its 1993 vote; in conformity with McFaul's sixth and seventh hypotheses, the remainder is spread across a broad mix of parties, including not only Our Home Is Russia, but also the party lists of S. Federov, Popov, Lebed, and Govorukin, and our aggregation of 15 insignificant parties (row 9). Yavlinski's support, in contrast, is remarkably stable: Yabloko retains all of its 1993 vote and picks up additional small shares from Gaidar (.72 percent), Shakrai's Unity and Accord (.86 percent), and from new voters (1.68 percent). The 15 small parties in row 9 get only .56 of the vote from Yabloko, whereas the party lists associated with Lebed, Govorukin, S. Federov, and Popov get none. The picture here, then, is of one party, Russia's Choice, that hemorrhaged in nearly every direction, and of another, Yabloko, that maintained its base of support but failed to attract significant votes from anywhere else. Turning now to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, to rows 10 through 14 of Table 5, notice first that no coefficient in the last column under 'democratic + 67 centrist' is significant or positive; the bipolarity of the electorate is sustained. But if there is a parallel to Russia's Choice in the 'opposition' camp, it is the LDPR, whose 1993 vote dissipates across the LDPR, Rutskoi and company, the Communist Party, and Anpilov. Indeed, contrary to hypotheses H3 and H5, nearly half of Anpilov's vote comes from the LDPR, as well as nearly half of Rutskoi's and the Communist Party's. In contrast, the only significant loss experienced by the Communist Party is to Rutskoi's list. Now consider the columns denoted 'invalid ballots' and 'new voters'. The primary beneficiary of increased turnout is the Communist Party, which secures nearly onethird of all new voters, and overall, opposition parties secure nearly 60 percent of all such votes. However, although 12 percent of this increase is 'wasted' on Anpilov and Rutskoi et al. 's lists owing to their failure to qualify for seats in the Duma, democratic and centrist parties waste even more - all but the 12 percent of increased turnout that goes to Yabloko and the 5 percent that goes to Our Home Is Russia. Thus, the combination of fractionalization among democrats and the general edge given to opposition parties among new voters gives the Communists a 2-to-1 edge over democrats among new voters whose votes counted. Perhaps more importantly, though, recall that as turnout declined between 1991 and December 1993, the lost votes came almost exclusively from the reformist camp - from voters who voted for Yeltsin in 1991 and who voted Yes on the April referendum's first question. But those voters who 'reappear' in 1995 do not return by voting for reform; instead, a clear majority vote for opposition parties. The evide~ce, then, is consistent with the hypothesis that a significant part of the electorate - over eight percent of those voting in 1995 - moved from supporting reform in 1991 to oppose it in 1995, but only after they passed through a period of indifference to all parties and positions. The analysis of invalid ballots, the third column in Table 5, is interesting in and of itself. The difficulty here is that we are dealing with a relatively small fraction of the electorate, less than 5 percent, which helps to . make our estimates less reliable than usual. This fact is borne out by the prolifera~ion of negative estimates in the corresponding column of Table 5. Nevertheless, acc~·pting that our positive estimates 'i 68 are in all likelihood biased upwards, Notice that the primary beneficiary of the decline in invalid ballots is the communist party, with the LDPR and Our Home Is Russia a close second and third, respectively. This is indeed curious, since normally we would expect invalid ballots to be spread uniformly across the parties. It is as if only the 'party of power' and the primary opposition parties can attract previously 'stupid' voters. We might, of course, attempt to fashion a variety of stories to explain these estimates, but here we note simply that if the sharp rise in invalid ballots in 1993 is somehow a byproduct of election fraud (Sobyanin 1995), our estimates here suggest that that fraud was not a uniform phenomena but concentrated somehow in rayons that gave the LDPR, the Communist Party, and any party associated with the Kremlin special support. Finally, Table 5 allows us to reconsider McFaul's fourth hypothesis about the vanishing center in Russian politics. If we take the center in 1993 to be Shakrai's Unity and Accord, Travkin's DPR, Women of Russia, and those parties that failed to qualify for seats, we cannot confirm H4. Our estimates at least suggest that the DPR's vote, for instance, dissipates across Our Home Is Russia, the lists offered by S. Federov, Popov, Lebed and Govorukin, plus other democratic parties such as those headed by Pamfivoliva and Boris Federov. Women of Russia appear to have given their lost votes primarily to Pamfivoliva, B. Federov and our collection of 15 small parties, whereas Shakrai lost votes primarily to Rybkin, with smaller shares given to Our Home Is Russia, Yabloko, and a variety of insignificant parties. Indeed, regardless of how we re-constitute our categories of parties, we find no evidence that the votes lost by any of these parties went to any opposition party. In summary, then, of the seven hypotheses that summarize McFaul's analysis, four are confirmed here but three are not. Hypotheses Hl: "Russian politics are bipolar," H2: "no change in the balance of support between the two camps," H6: "Chernomirdin got votes mostly from Gaidar's supporters," and H7: "party proliferation within the reformist camp weakened the representation of reformists within the Duma are strongly supported"; on the other hand we find little evidence consistent with H3: "shift from nationalism toward communism", H4: "centrist voters voted for 69 the opposition," and H5: "the opposition benefited from the high turnout in 1995." It is not so much that we see a migration of centrist voters into the opposition camp or a bevy of new voters supporting extremist lists such as Anpilov's. Instead, if we see change it is primarily in the form of a segment of the electorate - perhaps as much as ten percent - making the transition from supporting reform to indifference to voting with the opposition. Long-term Trends and Conclusions Thus far, we have examined pairs of adjacent elections, but, as a check on our conclusions, two other comparisons should be considered - comparisons that allow us to trace the fl.ow of votes directly from the 'heyday' of reform, 1991, to December 1993 and 1995. Looking first, then, at the comparison of 1991 to 1995, Table 6 gives our results in the same form as before. 8 Three things in particular are apparent from this table: First, those who voted in 1991 for the communist candidate Ryzhkov continue to vote against reform by supporting opposition parties in 1995. Indeed, those who voted for any candidate other than Yeltsin in 1991 vote, with but some small exceptions, for opposition lists in 1995. Second, Yeltsin's original support in 1991, although continuing to favor parties that are not explicitly opposed to reform (the parties corresponding to rows 1 through 9 in Table 6) 2 to 1 over parties opposed to reform, is nearly uniformly spread across party lists. Moreover, although Zhirinovsky's LDPR gains seven percent of this vote, the Communist Party gains even more, ten percent. In a word, Yeltsin's original support has dissipated to nearly all points. Finally, notice that although some of Ryzhkov's voters (approximately 15 percent of his original vote) have entered the ranks of nonvoters, some 20 percent of Yeltsin's far larger share are nonvoters in 1995. Hence, even though turnout increased in 1995 over the levels it achieved in 1993, a significant part of the electorate that favored Yeltsin in 1991 continued to stay away from the polls four years later. 70 Turning now to Table 7, which compares 1991 with December 1993, we see a somewhat clearer picture of the fl.ow of Yeltsin's original support. In particular, notice that although the LDPR gets ten percent of Yeltsin's original vote, the Communist and Agrarian parties, in contrast to 1995, together get none of it! Moreover, fully 37 percent of Yeltsin's vote enters the nonvoting ranks whereas only 30 percent vote for Russia's Choice, Yabloko, Future of Russia or RDDR and another 16 percent vote for the remaining (centrist?) parties on the ballot. Insofar as the constitutional referendum is concerned, 47 percent of Yeltsin's original supporters vote for his constitution - presumably those who voted for reform and centrist parties - whereas 77 percent of those supporting Ryzhkov voted against the constitution. Interestingly, notice that, in keeping with his campaign advice, Zhirinovsky's supports also give majority approval to the constitution. Tables 6 and 7 together, then, are consistent with the view offered earlier of a 'reform' electorate that erodes into ranks of nonvoters, and reappears in 1995 as part of the support garnered by the opposition to Yeltsin's policies and reform. This finding about the ebb and fl.ow of nonvoters, along with the finding that the original support received by Communist and opposition candidates has largely held firm, is perhaps this essay's core conclusion. However, before we can give full confidence to such conclusions, we must check the potential for aggregation error - the possibility that, contrary to our assumption that the same parameters characterize all rayons, different subpopulations act differently. As a partial check against such error, the data at our disposal allows us to check for the possibility that urban and rural voters act differently. We know, of course, that such voters not only confront different economic and social circumstances and that they are impacted by Yeltsin's policies differently, but that they also vote differently, with urban voters being much more supportive of Yeltsin and reformist parties than rural voters (see, for example, Hough et al. 1996, Clem and Craumer 1993, 1995, and Slider et al. 1994) and with rural rayons reporting much higher rates of turnout than urban ones. The question, however, is whether, for instance, rural voters who supported Yeltsin in 1991 defected in different ways subsequently than did voters who 71 came from cities. Table 8, then, reproduces the coefficients reported in Table 6 except that each cell reports two coefficients - the first for rayons with 70 percent or more urban residents and the second for their 'non-urban' counterparts. Perhaps the two most important things revealed by this table, at least from the perspective of the conclusions we offer earlier, is, first, that regardless of whether we look at urban or non-urban subpopulations, Yeltsin's 1991 vote disperses itself across the ideological spectrum whereas Ryzhkov's vote holds firm against reform in 1995. Second, 20 percent or more of Yeltsin's original vote, both urban and rural, became nonvoters in 1995 whereas none of Ryzhkov's urban support and only 13 percent of his rural support failed to vote in Russia's second parliamentary election. This is not to say that there are no differences between urban and rural voters. Notice, for example, that if we look down Yeltsin's column, the first coefficient is greater than the second in the first nine rows, but thereafter (excepting the last row, which corresponds to the difference in turnout) the second number is greater. The implication, then, is that in urban constituencies, the majority (but not all) of Yeltsin's vote moved to reformist or centrist parties, whereas in rural rayons that vote moved predominantly to anti-reform parties. Here, however, we can only infer general tendencies since more often than not the coefficient for urban and nonurban subpopulations are not statistically significantly different - a fact that gives us some confidence in believing that aggregation error does not significantly impair our previous conclusions. We should, though, offer one note of caution with respect to Zhirinovsky's 1991 supporters. Although we are concerned here with less than eight percent of the electorate, the coefficients for those voters seem especially unstable, with significant negative values appearing in three of our regressions (the regressions corresponding to Russia's Choice, the Communists, and nonvoters). A coefficient of 60 for urban rayons and -20 for rural ones with respect to nonvoters suggests the possibility of significant aggregation error in our overall estimate of the coefficient for Zhirinovsky with respect to this regression in Table 6. Notice that a similar problem exists with respect to Ryzhkov's supporters. Although the difference there, 0 versus 72 13, is less pronounced than for Zhirinovsky, neither of these numbers is as great as the estimate Table 6 reports for the share of Ryzhkov voters who became nonvoters in 1995. This disparity suggests that the percentage given in Table 6, 15 percent, overestimates the share of the communist vote that failed to appear at the polls. Of course, this possibility merely strengthens our conclusion that new nonvoters in 1993 and 1995 came predominantly from Yeltsin's original base of support. Overall, then, the analysis offered here paints a remarkably consistent picture of hard-and-fast opposition, a part of the electorate that moves from supporting reform to opposing it after first becoming indifferent to all candidates, and a reform core that succeeded in both parliamentary elections in dividing itself up among a plethora of candidates and parties. It remains to be seen, of course, whether reform candidates in the future can recapture some of their lost support or whether the erosion witnessed over the last four years will continue. 73 Table 1: Summary of Election Outcomes 1991 Yeltsin 57.3% Ryzhkov 16.9 Zhirinovsky 7.8 Others 13.9 Against All 1.9 Turnout 74.7 April 1993 December 1993 Confidence to Yeltsin 1 58.7% No Confidence to Yeltsin 38.5 Turnout 64.2 December 1995 Russia's Choice 14.3 3.9 Our Home is Russia - 10.3 Other Democrats - 4.8 Rybkin, Shakrai 6.2 1.49 RDDR 3.8 - DPR 5.1 - Yabloko 7.3 7.0 Others 4.3 - S. Federov, G. Popov - 4.1 - 5.41 7.5 4.7 LDPR 21.1 11.4 Derzhava - 4.9 Communist 11.5 22.7 Working Russia - 4.6 Agrarians 7.4 3.8 Against All 3.9 2.83 Invalid 7.6 1.23 Turnout 54.8 63.2 Lebed, Govorukin ·::~ ~ Women of Russia . I 74 Table 2: Vote Changes Between 1991 and April 1993 Yes 1 No 1 Nonvoters Invalid Totals Yeltsin Ryzhkov Zhirinovsky Others 73 7 36 30 (42.29) (1.15) (2.86) (5.27) 8 87 55 52 (4.64) (14.4) (4.37) (9.13) 18 4 5 14 (10.4) (.07) (.04) (2.33) 1 2 2 3 (.058) (0.32) (.15) (.48) 100 100 98 99 (57.91) (16.57) (7.78) (17.21) Totals (51.56) (32.54) (13.83) (1.53) Numbers in parentheses are percentages of those who voted. 75 Table 3: Vote Changes Between April and December 1993 For Constitution Against Constitution Nonvoters Invalid ballots Russia's Choice Yabloko DPR Unity and Accord Women of Russia LDPR Communists Agrarians Others Totals Yes No Totals 69% (41.2) 19% (7.24) (48.66) 4 (2.39) 78 (29.7) (33.53) 25 (14.95) 2 (.76) . (15.71) 6 (3.58) 6 (2.28) (6.21) 23 (13.7) -4 (-1.52) (12.10) 10 (5.92) 0 (0) (6.1) 4 (2.32) 4 (1.52) (4.2) 6 (3.58) 2 (.76) (5.22) 6 (3.58) 6 (2.28) (6.3) 10 (5.98) 35 (13.35) (20.08) 0 (0) 22 (8.38) (8.91) -6.0 (-3.58) 25 (9.52) (6.20) 14 (8.37) 2 (.76) (9.13) 98/104 (59.8) 99/104 (38.1) 76 Table 4: Vote Changes From 1991 to 1995 ota s 01ce Our Home is Russia (2.55) (0) 11 -1 (.62) (6.16) Other Democrats Rybkin, Shakrai & Others Yabloko S. Federov, G. Popov Lebed, Govorukin Women of Russia 15 Small Parties LDPR Derzhava Communist Working Russia Agrarians Nonvoters (0) 0 (0) (7.87) 0 (0) 1.9 (.27) (3.55) 7 (.58) -2.7 (-48) (2.1) 0 (0) (5.08) 5 (0.7) (3.45) 0 (0) (4.47) (-.62) (1.93) 3.6 (2.0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 10 (5.56) -3 (-.78) 5 (2.75) 0 (0) 7 (3.89) 2 (0.58) 3.4 (1.89) 0 (0) 6.1 (.50) 4.3 (.60) (2.99) 6 (3.36) 0 (0) 0 (0) 2 (.28) (3.64) 7 (3.89) 6 (1.07) 46 (3.82) 10 (1.40) (10.18) 3.7 (2.0) 7.4 (1.32) 14 (1.16) -2 (-.28) (4.2) 10 (5.56) 42 (7.58) 5 (.4) 62 (8.78) (22.32) 2 (1.1) 5.4 (.96) 20 (1.7) 2 (.3) (4.06) -2 (-1.1) 18 (3.22) 8 (.66) 4 (.56) (3.34) 6 (1.08) (15.15) 5.9 (3.28) 0 (0) 19 (10.56) ota s (53.45) (17.25) (9.03) (13.21) 77 Table 5: Vote Changes From December 1993 to 1995 RC 25 (3.15) Yabl 0 (0) Others 0 (0) Zir 0 (0) Com -2 (-.3) Inv 0 (0) NV 6 (-8) Our Home is Russia 26 (4.5) 0 (0) Travkin 17 (.7) Shakrai 25 (1.15) 0 (0) 0 (0) 36 (2.19) 5 (-7) Yabloko 6 (-72) 100 (6.24) Travkin 18 (.86) -2 (-.4) -2 (-.3) -19 (-1.15) 12 (1.68) Other Democrats 28 (3.3) 4 (.24) Travkrn 18 (.80) WOR 19 (1.21) 0 (0) 0 (0) -10 (-.6) 3 (.42) Rybkin. Shakrai 0 (0) 0 (0) Shakrai 67 (3.20) Others 9 (.88) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) -10 (-1.4) S. Federov, G. Popov 15 (1-8) 0 (0) Travkin 18 (.8) Others 20 (1.9) 0 (0) 0 (0) -11 (-.66) 5 GO Lebed, Govorukin 17 (2.04) 0 (0) Travkrn 73 (3.25) 0 (0) 0 (0) -16 (-.97) 10 (1.4) Women of Russia 0 (0) 0 (0) WOR 56 (3.59) Others 10 (.98) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 7 (.98) 15 Small Parties 14 (1.68) 9 (.56) Shakrai 10 (.47) WOR 26 (1) Others 14 (1.3) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (1.3) Russia's Choice LDPR -2 (-86) 34 (6.8) 10 (1.5) 43 (2.6) 14 (1.96) Derzhava (-.3.6) (-1.54) 11 (2.2) 25.6 (2.26) 5 (.3) 10 (1.6) Communist -11 (-4.73) 58 (11.6) 56 (8.4) 50 (3.0) 32 (4.48) Working Russia 0 (0) 7.3 (1.46) 14 (.86) 24 (1.44) 2 (.28) Agrarians 0 (0) 0 (0) 59 (5.39) 0 (0) 0 (0) 78 Table 6: Vote Changes From 1991 to 1995 Totals Yeltsin 4.6 (2.55) Ryzhkov 0 (0) Zhirinovsky -7.5 (-.62) Others 0 (0) Our Home is Russia 11 (6.16) -1 (.62) - 0 (0) (7.87) Other Democrats 5.9 (3.28) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1.9 (.27) (3.55) 3.6 (2.0) 0 (0) 7 (.58) -2.7 (-48) (2.1) 10 (5.56) -3 (-.78) - 0 (0) (5.08) 5 (2.75) 0 (0) 0 (0) 5 (0.7) (3.45) 7 (3.89) 2 (0.58) - 0 (0) (4.47) 3.4 (1.89) 0 (0) 6.1 (.50) 4.3 (.60) (2.99) 6 (3.36) 0 (0) 0 (0) 2 (.28) (3.64) 7 (3.89) 6 (1.07) 46 (3.82) 10 (1.40) (10.18) 3.7 (2.0) 7.4 (1.32) 14 (116) -2 (-28) (4.2) 10 (5.56) 42 (7.58) 5 (-4) 62 (8.78) (22.32) 2 (1.1) 5.4 (.96) 20 (1.7) 2 (.3) (4.06) -2 (-1.1) 18 (3.22) 8 (.66) 4 (.56) (3.34) 19 (10.56) 15 (2.68) 10 (.83) 6 (1.08) (15.15) '96.2 —913 IU33 92.5 (53.45) (17.25) (9.03) (13.21) Russia's Choice Rybkin, Shakrai ⅛ Others Yabloko S. Federov, G. Popov Lebed, Govorukin Women of Russia 15 Small Parties LDPR Derzhava Communist Working Russia Agrarians Nonvoters Totals (1.93) 79 Table 7: Vote Changes From 1991 to 1993 Democrats Russia's Choice, Yabloko Future of Russia, RDDR LDPR Communist & Agrarians Others Invalid Ballots Turnout Difference Yeltsin Ryzhkov Zhirinovsky Others 30% (17.64) 0 (0) -21 (-1.5) 11 (1.5) (17.64) 10 (5.8) 10 (1.6) 80 (6.0) 24 (3.26) (28.5) 0 (0) 61 (9.78) 18 (1.35) 17 (2.31) (13.44) 16% (9.4) 12 (192) -6 (-0.45) 22 (2.99) (13.86) 6 (3.52) 9 (l.44) -8 (-0.60) 6 (0.81) (5.17) 37 (21.75) 2 (0.32) 22 (1.65) 17 (2.31) (26.08) Totals ~\. For Constitution Against Constitution Totals 47% (27.6) 12 (7.05) 15 (2.4) 77 (12.35) 50 (3.75) 27 (2.02) 45 (6.12) 34 (4.62) 99/96 (58.1/ 56.4) 94/94 (15.6/ 15.1) 85/99 6.45/ 7.42) 97/96 (13.18/ 13.1) . I (39.87) (26.04) 80 Table 8: Vote Changes From 1991 to 1995; Urban/N on-Urban Rayons Yeltsin Ryzhkov Russia's Choice 3/1.8 Our Home is Russia Other Democrats Others 0/0 Zhirinovsky -18/0 11/9.8 0/0 0/0 0/0 6/3 1/0 0/3 0/1.6 Rybkin, Shakrai & Others 4.5/2.5 -6/2 21/0 -6/0 Yabloko 13/4.8 0/0 0/0 0/1.8 S. Federov, G. Popov 4.8/2 0/.4 0/.4 7/2.5 Lebed, Govorukin 6.5/4.5 3/3 3/3 0/1 Women of Russia 3.5/2.5 -2/0 17/2.5 3/3.5 15 Small Parties 6.1/5 2.8/0 2.8/0 7.8/0 LDPR 6/8 6/7 40/48 13/8 Derzhava 3.3/5 14/5 3/16 -1/0 Communist 8/16 54/42 -47 /27 62/56 Working Russia 2/3.6 3/5 20/9 1/3.5 Agrarians 0/2.4 5/18 8/2 0/8 Nonvoters 20/25 0/13 60/-20 -13/13 0/0 81 Chapter 4 Irregularities in the December 1993 Russian Election Returns Introduction The results of past elections in Russia have been a subject of considerable controversy. According to Alexander Sobyanin, for example, no fewer than 9 million ballots were falsified during the December 1993 elections. Moreover, the number of such accounts has been considerably growing during the past five years. Insofar as the specifics of the Russian case are concerned, the general acceptance of allegations of fraud is unsurprising. First and most suspiciously, official elections returns have never been published except at a very high level of aggregation - the region - that precludes reanalysis. Second, neutral observers had virtually no opportunity to organize effective oversight. Third, given the stakes of the election - control of the national legislature (1993 and 1995) and adoption of a new federal constitution (1993) - even cautious observers would concede that fraud must have occurred at some level. What are the means of detecting and uncovering elections fraud? Obviously, one who in building a case to support such allegations in a court of law should primarily focus on voter registration rolls, actual ballots that had been cast, and accounts by witnesses and observers. Unfortunately such a way to approach this problem does not work in Russia because the Central Election Commission, which is supposed to collect such evidence and release it to the public, usually acts as if no laws are written to regulate its activities. For example, the Russian Parliament voted a number of times in 1994 and 1995 to compel the Commission to release the December 1993 election returns to the public. All such requests have been ignored. Moreover, in Russia it is incredibly difficult to arrange for observers to be present at any significant proportion of the over forty thousand voting stations. This happens primarily because of the 82 lack of transportation to and from rural areas. Thus, in the absence of observers and actual ballots, the only possibility that remains to make inferences about falsification of election results is to look at aggregated voting totals. The lower the level of aggregation, the more observations are available for the analysis, the fewer the number of logically admissible scenarios, and, as a result, the more reliable the analysis can be done. The main purpose of this chapter is to develop a formal methodology of studying aggregated election returns which can be used to detect election fraud using the December 1993 parliamentary elections voting data as an example. Of course, it is impossible to prove or disprove the hypothesis of fraud simply on the basis of voting data. One might always argue that people just voted the way the data show, no matter how weird the voting patterns look. Therefore, the bottom line of the analysis presented here is not that election fraud was (or was not) one of the factors of the electoral process. Instead, the methodology presented here allows to detect "voting irregularities" that might raise suspicion of foul play. Elections in Russia: Before and After 1985 Free popular elections were not of importance in Russia before 1985. The monopoly on power of the Communist Party (Article 6 of the USSR constitution) allowed no other party or organization to offer competing candidates. Nominations were made by party officials, and the general public had little opportunity to influence the process. No more than one candidate was nominated for a seat, essentially no political campaigning was allowed, and no one could express views other than those officially sanctioned by officials. In this regime, elections were organized as a show of public support for the candidates of a "stable block of communists and non-party members." Responsibility for staging the show was in the hands of local party authorities, and official results always approximated 99.99 percentage approval for the candidates of the Communist Party and 99.99 percent turnout. All of the above suggests that the electoral process was far from what free and democratic elections are supposed to 83 be. Moreover, institutions filled by popular election (soviets) played no significant political or executive role. The adoption of a new electoral law in 1987 for the USSR opened a new page in the process of democratization. One-half of the members of the new Union Congress were elected in the first multi-candidate elections since 1917, and, although the Communist Party kept control of over 50 percent of the seats, ordinary voters had the opportunity to choose between different candidates and to participate in the nomination process. Some degree of free campaigning was also allowed. In the parliamentary elections in Russia in 1990 for the RCPD, no seats were allotted to the Communist Party or to other organizations. All candidates were selected through multi-candidate, singlemember district competition. The Presidential election in 1991, which produced six candidates, became the first in Russian history in which mass media were used as a campaigning tool. Finally, parliamentary elections in December 1993 brought a multi-party system into Russian political institutions. As election rules and laws became more democratic, as people secured the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, there remained one factor that had not been the subject of reform and which concerns this research. That factor is who has control of the actual conduct of elections. Who were the officials responsible for supervising elections and counting ballots? Local authorities, it turns out, were still in charge of the process, as they were 10, 20, or 30 years before. They have been "running" the regions for many years and control everything from regional policies and budgets to crop harvesting. The overwhelming power retained by local authorities with respect to the electoral process has been a cornerstone of elections in Russia for several decades. That power was robust against any political changes or reforms. Before 1991 regional authorities were officially called "secretaries of oblast party committees." After August of 1991 they became "Heads of Local Administration." Despite the fact that the Communist party was officially eliminated as a ruling power, virtually all local party bosses were reappointed by Yeltsin as heads of local administration. That meant not only the same style of ruling as before, but also the same personalities playing the game. Thus, even though 84 the election rules have become more democratic, their implementation has remained unchanged. On the other hand, some changes have had differential impact up on urban versus rural areas. Observers at polling places, media coverage of the preelection campaigns, as well as the relatively high degree of political activity of voters played an increasing role in many big cities. Those factors make it difficult for local authorities to entirely control elections. In contrast, most villages and small cities have not been touched by reforms, and, as many observers contend, it is those places that became a major source of voting irregularities during the December 1993 elections. The December 1993 Russian elections, which were held only two months after the dissolution of the Russian Congress of People Deputies, presented voters with four decisions: 1. Election of an independent deputy to the State Duma (the lower chamber of the legislature). One half of the Duma was to be formed on the basis of 225 single member districts. 2. A party list preferential vote. The other half of the Duma was to be elected in one national district through a party list, proportional representation system with a five percent cutoff level. 3. Choice of two candidates to the newly created upper legislative chamber, the Federation Council. Candidates to the Federation Council were running in 89 two-member districts, and each voter could (but did not have to) cast two votes. The 89 districts corresponded 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 major surprise 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, that Russia's Choice would win a plurality, if not a majority, of seats. 85 Communists and agrarians did not appear to have significant support, and nationalists were below the five percent cutoff level (Shlapentokh 1995). Nevertheless, the final outcome gave a clear plurality to 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 have argued 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 effects of the electoral law, combined with the inability of democrats to form coalitions (Remington 1994). A third hypothesis is that massive election fraud exaggerated the difference between the outcome and pre-election polls. The basis for such claims is that election results have not been officially published, and voting data, unofficially acquired by representatives of the Russia's Choice, suggest various irregularities. A number of articles in Russian and foreign newspapers, motivated by "strange" election outcomes, argue that an official investigation should be launched to assess these allegations of fraud (Sobyanin 1994a, Sobyanin 1994b; Sobyanin and Sukhovolskii 1994; Salie 1994; Vizitovich 1994; Piatkovskii 1994). The influential newspaper "MK" (Moskovskii Komsomolets) called the elections "a brick fallen on the head of Russian democracy" (Sorokina 1994). Others argue that no fraud occurred since the Central Election Commission approved the results of the elections, and that the issue of fraud is a legal question and that "no mathematidaj speculations may imply such suspicion" (Vedeneev and Lysenko 1994). The only official response to allegations of fraud from the office of presidential administration took the same line: " .. . those people [Sobyanin and his group] used to analyze election results, then they started to implement some scientific methods. I doubt that their methods are correct" (Filatov 1994). This chapter investigates whether or not the hypothesis of significant election fraud can be rejected on the basis of available data. Specifically, we look at these . '· presumed irregularities and ask: do these irregularit.ies imply election fraud, or can 86 they be accounted for by other factors? We should state at the outset that, given available data, it is virtually impossible to conclusively prove or disprove the existence of election fraud. Instead, proceeding on the basis of circumstantial evidence, we show that the hypothesis of fraud is consistent with both observed aggregate patterns in the data and the incentives of key players, and that it provides the most likely explanations for these patterns. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. First, the key players of the electoral process, and their incentives to falsify the election results, are identified. In particular, although the importance of elections and the formal rules dramatically changed, the administration of election machinery remained in the same hands. Second, a number of apparent voting irregularities in the data are shown. Third, we introduce several alternative models that "explain" these irregularities. These models are not the only ones consistent with the data and therefore do not exhaust other possibilities, but we believe that the options considered are the most realistic possible explanations of what happened. Fourth, we present evidence in favor and in opposition to each model. Finally, concluding remarks state lessons that should be learned in the future with respect to election administration. The December 1993 Election: Actors and Incentives The Central Election Commission, in charge of running the elections, appointed 89 regional election commissions, which in turn appointed thousands of local commissions. Each region in Russia consists of a number of" rayons" (counties). In the past, all rayons had their own election commission. Those commissions were eliminated before the December 1993 election (later we discuss an explanation for this change). Local (sub-rayon) commissions were in charge of counting votes at precincts and they in turn reported the results to regional commissions. After the regional commissions received the results, they aggregated the data to the rayon level and prepared official 87 reports for the Central Commission in Moscow. All commissions consisted of working members and observers, and each party could assign its representatives to work at the commissions as observers. Even though the executive structure of elections might look democratic, several features suggest the opposite. First, the working members of regional election commissions - the only people who had access to the actual ballots - were appointed by and worked under the direct control of Heads of Local Administration. This fact is extremely important, because in 67 of 89 regions, local "heads" were running for seats in the Federation Council. A total of more than 100 representatives of top local executive officials were elected to the Federation Council. Only eight of them lost. Second, election commissions were not required by law to make voting outcomes available to the public on any level of aggregation lower than the regional one. Even results aggregated on the regional level have never been published officially. Thus, the Central Election Commission released the outcomes of elections after aggregating the results to the national level. Only one of the 89 regions (Niznii Novgorod) published data at the "rayon" level of aggregation. Third, in most regions members-observers of electoral commissions did have access to the data until after they were aggregated to the regional level. Moreover, the Central Election Commission deprived its observers of the right to see the data until after the results were officially published. Although the above factors constitute evidence strong enough to raise the possibility of election fraud (it is difficult to believe that people would not take advantage of the opportunities presented to them), a consistent set of incentives should be established. As discussed above, local heads were the key players during the elections. What were their incentives? On one hand, almost all of them were running for the Federation Council. On the other hand, almost none of them was an elected official, but were instead appointed by the President. Therefore, their incentives had to have much in common with the incentives of their boss. Moreover, old Communist party traditions certainly suggested that the best way to show loyalty to the president was to prove that the regions were supportive of his interests. The only issue on the ballot vital to Yeltsin was the referendum on the Constitu- 88 tion, which hinged primarily on turnout. By law, the Constitution would be approved only if more than 50 percent of the voters voted "yes," and if turnout exceeded 50 percent. All public opinion polls suggested that the draft of the constitution was supported by a very high margin of probable voters. But the question of turnout was up in the air, making the final outcome uncertain. In fact, it would seem that every voter who voted against the Constitution acted irrationally, since the constitution had a much greater chance of rejection through the mechanism of low turnout than by explicit disapproval of the voters. Therefore, the second incentive of local heads· was to provide at least 50 percent turnout in their regions. Unusually high rates of regional turn.out, then, might be a good indicator of election fraud. The election rules, together with incentives, suggest that the expectations of election fraud was plausible ex ante. In other words, the environment was not incentive compatible with running a clean election. In the following section we present the voting irregularities that make the above hypothesis plausible ex post. Voting Irregularities In the previous section we suggested that the voters turnout was a key parameter of the elections. In this section it is suggested that there were significant irregularities in the correlation between turnout and different parameters of the election outcomes. Moreover, it is crucial that these irregularities are not present in regions where local heads were not running, or were running and lost. Before we focus on actual irregularities that have been found in the data, it is important to state what is presumed to be a "regular" election outcome with respect to the turnout as an independent variable. Suppose that an election for a single seat is held in a large number of fairly homogeneous districts, and different percentages of eligible electorate turned out to vote in these districts. Assume, furthermore, that the election is a two-candidate election (for example, the presidential vote). It is natural to believe that the more voters showed up to vote, the more votes (in absolute numbers) are cast for each of the candidates. Later in this section we show that this assumption was violated in 89 many of Russia's districts in the December of 1993. The following section presents a number of models of electoral behavior that could account for such violations. Formally, the notion of an irregularity of correlation is defined as follows. Let voting outcomes on an issue be described by variables Tfor, Tag and T (T = Ttor+Tag), where Tfor is the percentage of the total number of eligible voters who supported the issue, Tag is the percentage of the total number of eligible voters who oppose the issue, and T is the turnout. Therefore, the main implication of the model is that T should be positively correlated with both Tfor and Tag· In other words, the higher turnout, the higher is the absolute numbers of people who supported or opposed the issue. Thus, according to the model, we call election results regular if T is positively correlated with the two other variables, T1 0 r and Tag, and the model is as follows: T1 0 r = A x T, and Tag = B x T, where A determines the level of support, and B determines degree of opposition for the issue. Obviously: A+B=l. The econometric model of a "regular" election can be written as where i corresponds to a district number within a region, and A 0 and B 0 are expected to be equal zero. As we noted earlier, the lowest level of data aggregation officially available was the level of region (state), whereas the data we consider are aggregated at the rayon (county) level. The information offered here has never been officially published and remains officially unavailable. It was collected by a number of different sources in the regions who were close to local administrations. In total, the elections outcomes are available in the form of 1300 observations, which cover 36 90 regions and 55 percent of the Russian electorate. Let us turn our attention to the OLS estimates of the above regressions. The analysis was conducted separately for 36 regions using rayon level data as individual observations for balloting results on two separate issues: the Referendum on the constitution and parliamentary election by party lists. On each of the two issues, the regressions results are presented in two separate tables. The regions in which heads of local elites where running for the seats and won are combined in one table, and the rest of the regions are placed in the other table. The data in Tables la and lb show the estimated coefficients for voting on the Constitution. Notice that in the regions where local heads either were not running or lost (Table la), all the coefficients in the regressions for the "Yes" votes are significantly different from zero, and, in most cases, the intercepts are close to zero, consistently with the model of a "regular" election. In contrast, in approximately fifty percent of the regions where local heads ran and won, these coefficients are not significantly different from zero. On the other hand, the coefficients that concern the "No" votes are significant and positive in all of the regions. The data in Tables 2a and 2b present OLS estimates of the above model for the parliamentary election outcomes. The 13 political parties that took part in the election are divided into two groups: anti-reformists and reformists. The first group includes the Communist Party, the Agrarian Party, and the nationalist Liberal Democtaric Party. The other parties are put into the second group. As far as the reformist parties are concerned, in all but two of the regions where the local heads won the election, the results are inconsistent with the model of a "regular" election. On the other hand, in the second group of the regions, these coefficients are significant and positive. The data in Tables 3 and 4 present separate OLS estimates for the members of the anti-reformist group. This consistency check shows if those three parties are considered separately then the results hold. This means that there is no aggregation bias in the analysis of the anti-reformist block as a whole. Thus, we see that the December 1993 election results are consistent with the model of a "regular" election in the regions where local bosses either lost the election 91 or did not run for a seat. The analysis also shows that every increment in turnout added virtually zero votes for the block of democratic parties in each and every region where local heads won the election. The same increment in turnout added votes for the block of anti-reformist parties. The results are mixed, however, for the voting on the constitutional issue. Notice that average turnout was much smaller in the first group of the regions than in the second group. In fact, in the regions where local bosses were not running or lost, average turnout was less than fifty percent the threshold necessary for the constitution to be approved. In the next section we consider a number of models which could account for the observed irregularities. Figures 1 - 6 provide visible illustrations of this data. All graphs portray turnout on the horizontal axis and either Tf or or Tag on the vertical. Figures 1, 2 and 3 show absolute percentages of those who supported or opposed the constitution for three typical regions. Figures 4, 5 and 6 illustrate different patterns for party lists for the same three regions. In two of the three regions, local bosses won the election, and in the third region (Sverdlovsk), the local boss lost the election. Finally, unusually high turnout in rural areas looks suspicious for that time of the year. For the territories with essentially no roads, no buses, and no telephones, with very short periods of daylight, and with the temperature falling below -30° (F), it is hard to believe that 80 percent of eligible voters were able to get to precincts by traveling, in many cases, dozens of miles. On ~he other hand big cities, with much closer polling places and much better transportation, produced only 49 percent turnout. Models: Election Fraud or Something Else? The first model presented in this section focuses on the election fraud as a possible explanation of the observed irregularities. Before the model is considered, it is important to provide a definition of what we mean by saying. the words" election fraud." We assume that such actions as ballot-stuffing, doctori:p.g numbers in official protocols, . ' and illegal voter mobilization should all be consider~d parts of election fraud. It is 92 often impossible to distinguish which of these factors played a crucial role in an election outcome by merely looking at the aggregate voting data. In fact, the cornerstone of the analysis presented here - the suspiciously high turnout in some areas compared to others - could be a result of any of these factors. Therefore, it is not a purpose of this research to prove that election fraud occurred in the form of, for example, ballot-stuffing. Instead, we show that the high turnout numbers and related voting patterns do not seem to be a result of a free and fair election. Irregularities in the data suggest that in the regions where local heads of administration won a seat in the Federation Council, every increment in turnout resulted in the same increment in percentage of votes cast against the block of democratic parties in the party list competition for State Duma seats, and, in more than 50 percent of such regions, against Constitution. For many observers, the obvious explanation of this pattern is ballot box stuffing or other forms of election fraud as discussed above. Local heads who ran for seats in the Federation Council and who administered the elections had a clear incentive and opportunity to increase the numbers of votes cast for them in the protocols aggregated to the rayon level 1 or make rayon officials to organize such a voters mobilization that the election would produce a desirable outcome. They were able to do this without danger of being caught since rayon election commissions had been eliminated. Also, they did not have to do it for all rayons. Instead, it was enough for them to "play" with only those rayons where nobody would be likely to check anything. It is not hard to guess that those rayons would be mostly rural. At the same time election outcomes on other issues were also altered to make vote totals consistent with the Federation Council returns. Moreover, by increasing the numbers for the Constitution, the second goal could be achieved - exceeding the 50 percent turnout level sought by Yeltsin. It is important to note that in the regions where local heads either were not running or just lost, average turnout was less than 50 percent whereas it exceeded 60 percent in the rest of the regions. 1 Protocols are the only official documents that contain information about election returns at any level of aggregation. For example, there are precinct protocols, rayon protocols, etc. The data that we present in this paper were taken directly from copies of rayon protocols. 93 Formally, the model of a "fraudulent" election is as follows. First, the "true" election outcomes had constant turnout across the districts. Second, different numbers of fraudulent ballots where added in different districts to support only one side of the issue on the ballot. In other words, all additional ballots supported only antireformist parties. Thus, the turnout becomes a random variable which positively correlates only with votes cast for these anti-reformist parties which is consistent with the irregularities described in the previous section. If the presumption of election fraud is correct, then the data suggest that in about 50 percent of cases, the extra ballots were marked "against" the Constitution, and in the other 50 percent of cases, the extra ballots were marked "for" as well as "against" the Constitution. How can this supposition be explained? First, one should notice that it was easy to alternate numbers in only one column of the protocol, since the numbers had to be consistent across protocols. Second, according to preelection polls, the constitutional draft was supported by more than 70 percent of the population. Thus if one decides to stuff ballots for the Constitution, the final numbers may look unrealistic (like 90 percent vs. 10 percent). Third, if, as we discussed above, the numbers were mostly altered for rural rayons, there would be less notice of irregularities because local, rayon authorities were overwhelmingly opposed to reforms. The reason of such an attitude rests on the fact that in rural rayons land was basically the only valuable good that local bosses could control. It is also well known that one of the bills that democrats were trying to pass through the parliament would allow private ownership of land, thus depriving rayon heads from their control over land distribution and management. This issue turned most of the rural rayon bosses away from the democratic camp. Thus, altering numbers in party lists outcomes by adding votes to an anti-reform bloc was also in keeping with their objectives. But the question still remains about the other 50 percent of the regions where balloting on the constitution seems to be regular while party lists votes are irregular. If one assumes that there was no election fraud in these regions, then a contradiction in voters preferences is inevitable. Namely, there must have been voters who voted "against" democratic parties and "for" the Constitution. On the other 94 hand, leaders of the anti-reformist parties appealed to their electorates to oppose the Constitution. Therefore, in these regions ends do not meet as in the other regions. Now let us consider some alternative hypothesis that explain the preceding irregularities without presuming significant fraud. We discuss two possibilities. The first presumes deterministic turnout among pro-reform voters and random turnout among anti-reform voters. Let us assume that everybody who supported the Constitution and democratic reforms decided whether or not to vote early in the campaign, and that the numbers of those pro-reform voters who decided to vote divided by the total numbers of registered voters were constant across rayons and oblasts. In contrast, suppose the opposition voted randomly. Everyone against reform would flip a coin in the morning of the election day in deciding whether or not to vote. Therefore, the total turnout can be presented as a sum of a deterministic (democrats) and a random (communists) components. This implies that any variance in the total turnout is due to the variance in the percentage of anti-reform persons who turned out to vote. Although this model can "explain" the correlation irregularities in the data, which are presented in Tables 1-2, and assumes no fraud, it cannot account for the increasing variance of votes in support of the Constitution as turnout increases. Second, it is unclear why people with different political affiliations should have different probabilistic voting strategies. Most importantly, it is suspicious that the model works for the regions where local heads won, and fails in the regions where local heads lost or were not running. Another alternative model assumes the presence of a third variable which is positively correlated with both turnout and opposition to the reforms. It is known that turnout and numbers of people who voted with the opposition are traditionally greater in rural areas. For example, if turnout in rural areas were 70 percent, and only 45 percent of voters supported reforms, while turnout in urban areas were 45 percent, and 70 percent of voters supported reforms, then the absolute support of opposition would increase with turnout, as the data suggest. Thus the percentage of rural population in a district can be that "third" variable that explains the irregularities discussed in the previous section. The strongest argument against this model is the fact that the 95 irregularities are not homogeneous. In other words, there are regions where voters in rural areas opposed both reformist parties and the Constitution, and there is approxim,ately the same number of regions where rural voters opposed reformist parties but supported the Constitution. A more plausible explanation behind rural versus urban effect in Russia's electorate is based on the fact that economic and political reforms had much more impact on urban areas than on rural ones. Therefore, urban voters have a good sense of what free and fair elections should look like, while rural voters still have strong memories of how elections were conducted in 70's and 80's resulting in 99.9 percent turnout and 99.9 percent support for a communist candidate. Also, it is much easier to commit unlawful voters mobilization in rural areas by promising that those who do not vote or those who vote "incorrectly" would be denied a number of goods and bonuses that the government still distributes in rural areas. Finally, this model also fails to accommodate the fact that voting irregularities are present in the regions where local heads won, and are not present in the regions where local heads lost or were not running. Concluding Remarks The main finding of this research is the fact that election irregularities are present in the regions where local heads won the election and are not present in other regions. That constitutes a piece of evidence in favor of the fact that election fraud was the source of these irregularities. Although our analysis does not prove beyond the reasonable doubt the fact the crime was committed, in a democratic country such a piece of evidence could become a basis for a more profound legal investigation. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Russia. The original ballots were destroyed shortly after the election, and the complete official set of protocols is still unavailable for the public. If the hypothesis about fraud holds, then what can be done to prevent such prob- lems in future? Several suggestions can be offered. First, the local electoral commissions should be neither controlled nor appointed by local officials. Moreover, the 96 whole organizational process should be separated from local authorities. This could be done in several different ways. For example, those commissions can be formed us ing a jury selection process. In other words, local election commissions can be formed of people who are randomly selected by computer and are not in any way affiliated with local administrations. Those people would count the ballots and report the data to the central election commission and to representatives of political parties and electoral blocs. Second, observers should be allowed to witness the election without any restriction. Third, a law must be written to establish criminal responsibility for election fraud. Finally, election outcomes must be accessible to the public at all levels of aggregation. Everybody should have access to the data. Another way to prevent election fraud is to establish a systematic mechanism of control that would detect election irregularities if any occur. As an example, let us consider a hypothetical group of observers that would cover a number of randomly preselected precincts (1-2 percent of the total number). It is clear that if those ob servers can insure fraud-free election at their precincts, and then the data from those precincts are aggregated, the results should not be significantly different from ones officially announced for the entire nation. On the other hand, if there is significant difference, then an investigation should be launched to check for election fraud. Finally, it is important to note that this chapter's findings do not invalidate the results of the analysis of the Chapter 3 which was based on the assumption that election returns are clean form falsifications. Even if the hypothesis about election fraud in 1993 is correct, and all of the detected irregularities are due to falsifications then, as Sobyanin (1994) pointed out, the amount of the faked ballots does not exceed 10 percent of the total vote. Remember that the methodology used in the previous chapter is designed to uncover general trends in the how of votes between elections rather than the exact parameters of such processes. The consistency checks (aggregate totals), as reported in Tables 2-7, show errors of a magnitude 5 to 10 percent per regression. This means that if the assumption about election fraud does not hold then the magnitude of such a noise in the data does not exceed the precision of the analysis, and, therefore, does not interfere with the conclusions of the chapter 97 3. However a number of interesting observations can be made by comparing the results of the last two chapters. Notice that a number of inconsistencies detected in the previous chapter, such as negative coefficients, totals in excess or below of 100 percent as well as results that contradict to some well known political facts, pertain only to the Communist party, the Agrarian party and the LDPR. These contradictions are only present when the December 1993 elections are involved. For example, the only negative coefficient in the Table 2 belongs to the Agrarian party, the total for the Communist party in the Table 3 exceeds 150 percent while LDPR's 10 percent support among Yeltsin's supporters (Table 3) obvio.usly does not make much sense. On the other hand as far as other parties and elections are concerned, no significant irregularities are observed. Totals in the Tables 2,4 and 6 add up to almost 100 percent each while the results clearly make sense. The same is true for the reformist parties when the December 1993 elections are involved (Tables 3,5 and 7). Moreover, the last result of the previous chapter shows that the "rural vs. urban" effect was not a factor in determining the flow of votes. Thus, we conjecture that since the irregularities independently found in the last two chapters involve the same players then they might have the same nature - election fraud. Recently Russian voters reelected Boris Yeltsin to the second term of his presidency. According to many observers the election con,duct appears to have been rather clean without any significant allegations of election fraud or misconduct. Does this fact mean that the problem of election fraud has be'en resolved and will not arise in the future? Although the election data are yet to be studied, a few rather optimistic conjectures can be made today. First, and most importantly, political culture of Russian voters has become much more mature over past few years. It appears that voters in rural areas do not assume anymore that they have to cast their ballots the way their bosses suggest. It is also apparent that voters paid attention to, and inferred information from, the pre-election campaign. A good piece of evidence in support of this fact is Yeltsin's approval increase from 5 percent in January to 35 percent in June. Secondly, local authorities seem to have realized that they cannot manipulate 98 election returns the way they want any more because the number of observers has increased by a factor of ten over the past four years. Finally, the Central Election Commission is now obligated to publish election returns no later than 90 days after an election. Therefore, it is harder for authorities in Moscow to alter just national aggregate totals and claim that the more refined data do not exists. If all this is true and will hold, then future Russian elections may well look like western ones where the key factors of success are candidates' platforms and campaigns but not the local authorities. "'> . i 99 Table la: OLS Estimates of Voting on the Constitution Regions, where Local Bosses Lost the Election or were Non Running "For" the Constitution "Against" the Constitution Region Coefficient (A) Ao Coefficient(B) so Rz Kamchatka oblast .91 7* .06 -8* .85 Magadan oblast .41 5* .53 -3* .61 Murmansk oblast .51 4* .43 -5* .64 Perm oblast .62 1* .35 -1* .53 Kalmik republic .19 -3* .82 4* .11 Sahalin oblast .74 -4* .14 3* .54 Sverdlovsk oblast .61 7 .36 -6 .71 Tomsk oblast .55 O* .42 O* .47 Khabarovsk krai .69 1* .19 -1* .22 Chelyabinsk oblast .56 O* .41 O* .51 Chukotka region .74 2* .18 -2* .32 "*" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level. 100 Table lb: OLS Estimates of the Voting on the Constitution Regions, where Local Bosses Won the Election "For" "Against" Region A Ao B Bo R2 Archangelsk oblast .53 1* .43 -1* .54 Belgorod oblast .01* 27 .98 -28 .67 Bryansk oblast .08* .91 Volgograd oblast .37 -.10* -23 -5* . .60 Vladimir oblast 22 4* 1.08 .55 -32 O* .88 Vologda oblast 31 O* Voronez oblast .00* 27 1.01 .89 Kalin.in.grad oblast .46 -2* .49 -28 1* Kaluga oblast .13* .88 .43 .56 -25 1* .76 Kemerovo oblast 23 -1* Kirov oblast .18* 19 .76 -21 .40 Krasnoyarsk krai .39 .59 .09* Moscow oblast .50 Niznii Novgorod oblast .06* .95 Novgorod oblast .58 26 -5* .42 -11 -20 -4* -27 6* .68 Kursk oblast 11 19 3* Oren.burg oblast .23 18 .75 -19 .62 Orel oblast .20* 13 .78 -14 .79 Penza oblast -.06* 29 1.07 -30 .78 Chuvashia republic -.28 43 1.24 -42 .89 Saratov oblast .22 16 .76 -16 .75 Smolensk oblast -.13* 37 1.16 -38 .81 Tver oblast .00* 30 1.00 -32 .76 Tula oblast .09* 21 .87 -22 .69 Ulianovsk oblast .04* 27 .95 -28 .76 .61 .43 .88 .45 .48 .35 .56 .72 .69 .54 .79 .71 "*" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level. 101 Table 2a: OLS Estimates of the Party Competition Model Regions, where Local Bosses Lost the Election or were Non Running Reformist Parties Anti-Reformist Parties Region Coefficient (A) Ao Coefficient( B) Bo R2 Kamchatka oblast .68 4* .24 -5* .81 Magadan oblast .55 6* .32 -6* .78 Murmansk oblast .40 1* .57 O* .75 Perm oblast .44 3* .52 -2* .57 Kalmik republic .30 5* .71 -7* .24 Sahalin oblast .53 O* .44 O* .43 Sverdlovsk oblast .24 20 .71 -20 .56 Tomsk oblast .29 10 .64 -11 .77 Khabarovsk krai .51 -1* .32 1* .62 Chelyabinsk oblast .16 20 .76 -20 .61 Chukotka region .84 3* .10 -4* .93 "*" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level. 102 Table 2b: OLS Estimates of the Party Competition Model Regions, where Local Bosses Won the Election Reformist Parties Region Archangelsk oblast Belgorod oblast Bryansk oblast Vladimir oblast Volgograd oblast Vologda oblast Voronez oblast Kaliningrad oblast Kaluga oblast Kemerovo oblast Kirov oblast Krasnoyarsk krai K ursk oblast Moscow oblast Niznii Novgorod oblast Novgorod oblast Orenburg oblast Orel oblast Penza oblast Chuvashia republic Saratov oblast Smolensk oblast Tver oblast Tula oblast Ulianovsk oblast Anti-Reformist Parties A Ao B Bo R2 .36 -.24 -.01* 0 39 35 34 41 31 .63 1.22 0 -42 -13 -34 -45 -34 -37 -35 -47 -26 -33 -26 -40 -34 -40 .56 .86 .74 .74 .90 .67 .88 .46 .85 .90 .70 .80 .92 -.00* -.32 -.04* -.17* -.05* -.04* .09* -.07* .03* -.23 .02* -.20 .06* -.13* -.07* -.27 -.34 .11* -.31 -.29 -.22 -.12* 36 33 39 22 26 26 35 37 38 24 32 35 40 47 30 43 46 42 34 1.01 1.00 1.30 1.05 1.15 1.05 1.04 .90 1.06 .94 1.24 .97 1.14 .93 1.10 1.08 1.26 1.21 .86 1.24 1.33 1.22 1.13 -30 -35 -37 -43 -47 -24 -43 -52 -.46 -37 .79 .82 .83 .85 .91 .89 .91 .59 .89 .92 .88 .87 "*" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level. 103 Table 3: OLS Estimates of the Party Competition Model Anti-Reformist Parties Listed Separately Regions, where Local Bosses Lost the Election or were Non Running Region CPRF APR LDPR Kamchatka oblast .04 .04 .17 Magadan oblast .10 .04 .19 Murmansk oblast .08 .01' .49 Perm oblast .05 .26 .20 Kalmik republic .11 .40 .19 Sahalin oblast .02* .09* .44 Sverdlovsk oblast .17 .15 .36 Tomsk oblast .10 .16 .41 Khabarovsk krai .01 .05 .22 Chelyabinsk oblast .11 .30 .34 Chukotka region .13 .08 .03 " *" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level 104 Table 4: 018 Estimates of the Party Competition Model Anti-Reformist Parties Listed Separately Regions, where Local Bosses Won the Election Region Archangelsk oblast Belgorod oblast Bryansk oblast Vladimir oblast Volgograd oblast Vologda oblast Voronez oblast Kaliningrad oblast Kaluga oblast Kemerovo oblast Kirov oblast Krasnoyarsk krai K ursk o blast Moscow oblast Niznii Novgorod oblast Novgorod oblast Orenburg oblast Orel oblast Penza oblast Chuvashia republic Saratov oblast Smolensk oblast Tver oblast Tula oblast Ulianovsk oblast CPRF .07 .25 .31 .09 .19 .04 .22 .09 .25 .11 .09 .11 .24 .28 .13 .12 .48 .43 .07 .51 .13 .23 APR .19 .61 .53 .52 .69 . .90 .57 .16 .76 .41 .83 .35 .46 .11 .34 .64 .40 .54 .49 .77 .43 .18 .93 .56 .73 .25 .27 .80 LDPR .36 .36 .18 .38 .42 .10 .39 .69 .08 .37 .13 .49 .42 .42 .46 .31 .30 .14 .36 -.07* .29 .20 .23 .40 .11 "*" - the coefficient is not significantly different from zero at .05 level 105 Figure 1 Volgograd oblast 60 I 50 • • • y·_,,,........ / v • V.· I • ·~ .i. j I I •• •_,,,,,,•~ . 20 ... J../ ~ • I & . 10 • ~• • & £1 ~ta.. '• ... -- - ....... A. ' .. .. • • • ... ... & .... '7 ... & - '!V"'I I... ~/..J ~ A .i. .. •• - ., 45 50 60 55 65 70 Turnout • "For" the Constitution • "Against" the Constitution . I 75 106 Figure 2 Voronez oblast 60 / '.y (' •• 50 I • •• :~ - /.1. ~ . ..... .,,_ - ~ i •/ . ~ / "" : "' J ,.._ - j, - "- . !Ao r j, i. • / .. v. .. 20 • A v • ... . . .... .... Ii ' i. i. I 10 40 ' 50 60 70 80 Turnout • "For" the Constitution • "Against" the Constitution 90 107 Figure 3 Sverdlovsk oblast 50 . a. J. a.A. . _, '· ... A. ~ a. .t ~ &Is. ... 40 r-- ~ ---- J. :----~ :• J. A ............. .t ... .t a. .& .t a. J. I • • 10 •- • •• • • • -• • • • ,. ,,,. I • 1• • • • • •• •• ~- ·--. ' 1. • • .II I I 0 40 45 55 50 Turnout a. 11 For" the Constitution 11 • Against" the Constitution 60 108 Figure 4 Volgograd oblast 60 I 50 / I I 1/ - • v • /• •~ I . ... ... ~ & • A 20 • '..-/1 -"' • y ·- i. / - / I i. \..} v.· ~· v. /• 1• • .......- ... • I ..6. A i.. • j ~ l,---._ ..."". " • • . . ... .._ A i. a. ..t --... J. ... --- ... 10 45 50 55 60 65 70 Turnout • Anti-Reformist Parties "' Reformist Parties 75 109 Figure 5 Voronez oblast 70 60 Tl ~ 50 JI • 2 Q) :0 40 0) / --· • :/, r Q) ... 4-- 0 .. # 30 j .... I&__ 20 ,.,,.. / I•• .... .A • •/ •V" ~ " t I I I ... ~ ... ·~ ... i. • /• v . ... • - - . • y• ~ - 0 > v· / • t.._ j, • ... ~ . ... ... -~ ... "' :--.. . 10 40 50 60 70 80 Turnout • Anti-Reformist Parties "' Reformist Parties 90 110 Figure 6 Sverdlovsk oblast 45 . - - 40 A ... Jr. j, .J!. ...... ... ,_ • IL i. ~ ... .... .. A ... ... ... .A. "'- A A . ... ... .... 35 A j, - ... i. M • 10 • ,,.. 5 40 ... I • •• .. • • .... • . I • I • ~ L,..--"" ~· • ••• • • • • __,. ~ •• v.-- • • • • _,.,.,.,.,.,.,. ~ --• • • ,,. • . . 45 r-1. ~ jj.. • i. 15 . ... j, ~ A .- .,.,.,.....,-ia 50 Turnout I 55 • Anti-Reformist Parties • Reformist Parties 60 111 Chapter 5 Appendixes Chapter 2 In this section we present formal proofs of the results (equilibrium strategies), which are discussed on pp. 8-9. For the sake of simplicity, we consider only the case of the initial status quo laying to the left of the core, as shown in Figure 1. If the status quo is to the right of the core, the results are perfectly symmetrical to those presented below. We assume that the Speaker always makes the first move by positioning the initial version of a bill ( B 0 ) in the policy space. After the deputees observe this move, they react by voting "yes" or "no" and by making amendments. At the second stage of the game, the Speaker can make his own amendments and reorder the set of previously made ones. Since we assume that the Speaker acts as a rational utility-maximizer within the framework of our model, and that he is the leader of this game, the equilibrium outcomes are formulated in terms of the best outcomes that the Speaker can guarantee himself. Propositions 1, 2 and 3 find those best outcomes and strategies contingent on different Speaker's ideal point locations in the policy space ( hi·). Remember that for now we only consider the case when the status 'quo is located to the left of the core. In general, the Propositions below prove that the Speaker can guarantee himself either B 0 or any point inside the interval [c1; r 1(B 0 )]. The following two statements are keys to understand the results. First, unless the Speaker wishes to live with the initial status quo, the location of the final outcome will belong to the core. Second, if the final outcome belongs to the core, then it should lay to the left of the indifference point of the pivotal voter, r 1(B 0 ). The intuition behind the former rests on the fact that if a bill passes "as background" and, therefore; is open for amendments, there .i 112 exists a deputee who will be willing to make an amendment, which would pass and bring the bill inside the core. As we know from the definition of the core, the bill cannot be amended if it is located in the core. The intuition behind the latter follows from the claim that the pivotal voter has to like the final version of the bill more than the initial status quo. Otherwise the bill would fail "as a whole." Proposition 1 states that if the Speaker's ideal point is to the left of the initial status quo then he will retain it. Proposition 1. If hi· :S B 0 , then the best outcome the Speaker can attain is B 0 , by proposing B* :S B 0 • Proof. Let us define R as a final location of the bill in the policy space. Suppose there exists such a sequence A= {a1, ... ,ak} that R < B 0. This means that R won the final vote against B 0 • This implies that l{i, Ui(R) 2: Ui(B 0 )}1 2: 2N/3. On the other hand we know that R < B 0 < c1 . By the definition of c1 and Ui (x), we get l{i, Ui(x) 2: Ui(B 0 )}1 < N/3. This is a contradiction. Definition. The point ri(x) is called the indifference point for deputy i with respect to a point x iff Ui(ri(x)) = Ui(x). Lemma I. If the voter i is such that hi 2: c1, and if x belongs to [B 0 , .•. , rl (B 0 )], then Ui(x) 2: Ui(B 0 ). Proof. Let d = hi - c1 2: 0. The assumption of homogeneous utility functions implies that Ui(x) = Ui(x - d), Ui(B 0 ) = U1(B 0 - d). Consider two cases. First assume that x - d 2: h1• Then Ui(x - d) 2: Uz(B 0 ) by the definition of the indifference point, and U1(B 0 - d) :S Ui(B 0 ) because of monotonicity. This implies that Ui(x) = U1(x - d) 2: Uz(B 0 - d) = Ui(B 0 ). Secondly, assume that x - d < hz. Then U1(x) is an increasing function on the interval that contains both points B 0 - d and x - d. This implies that Ui(x) = U1(x - d) 2: Uz(B 0 - d) = Ui(B 0 ) and Lemma I is proved. Lemma II. If the voter i is such that hi :S c1 and if x > rl(B 0 ), then Ui(x) < Ui(B 0 ). Proof. The proof is analogous to the proof of the Lemma I. Lemma III. If the voters vote sincerely, the initial status quo B 0 is to the left from 113 c1 and R is an equilibrium outcome, then: B 0 E ((c1, ... , c2 ] n [B 0 , ... , r 1(B 0 )]) U B 0 . Proof. The fact that B 0 is in the set of equilibrium outcomes was proved in Proposition 1. Now let us find what may be accepted as B*. It follows from Proposition 1, Lemma I, and Lemma II that these can only be points in the interval [B 0 , .. , r 1(B 0 )] and only them. If B* is in the core and it is accepted, then R = B*. Let us take any point x from the above interval which is not in the core ( x < c1 for example) and any sequence of amendments A= {a1, ... , ak} that results in the final outcome R which is not in the core (and is not the point B 0 ). Let us take a subsequence A'= {a 1 , ... , ap} of A such that any as in A' was accepted at some stage. First, we know that no points in the set A' are from the core. This follows from the fact that R is not in the core. Secondly, observe the structure of A', namely: Now we can take any voter i such that hi 2: c2 and note that that voter has an incentive to deviate and make and amendment a*= c1 + E, which is in the core and would be accepted if placed anywhere in the vector A. This means the triple (x, A, R) does not constitute an equilibrium. This is a contradiction and we conclude that any equilibrium outcome ( except B 0 ) must be in the core. The Lemma is proved. Lemma IV. Any point in the equilibrium set of Lemma I can be achieved as a result of some particular strategy of the Speaker, and does not depend on deputies' strategies. Proof. The fact that point B 0 can be achieved follows from Proposition 1. Now let us take any point x from the core such that x ::; r 1(B 1 ). If the speaker makes B* = x, then the Lemma I implies that it is accepted and the definition of the core implies that no amendments can beat it. The final vote will pass, because this is essentially the same vote as B 0 versus B*. The Lemma is proved. 114 The next two Propositions follow directly from Lemmas III and IV. Proposition 2 states that if the Speaker's ideal point is in between the initial status quo and the left hand bound of the core (c1), then the Speaker may choose between B 0 and c1 . Proposition 2. If hi· > B 0 and hi* S c1 , then the best outcome the Speaker can attain is a= argmax{Ui·(B 0 ), Ui•(c1 )}. Proposition 3 lists the Speaker's best outcomes contingent on different locations of his ideal point, if it is to the right of c1 . Proposition 3. If hi* > c1 , then the best outcome the Speaker can attain is: h* if f h* S r 1(B 0 ) and h* S c2 c2 otherwise We thus show that the Speaker, when the status quo is to the left of the core, can attain either the initial status quo or the point which is closest to his ideal point among the core points which are to the left of l's indifference point. If the status quo is to the right of the core, the results are symmetric. 115 Chapter 6 Endnotes Chapter 2 1. A number of highly influential formal analyses reveal that all voting systems are vulnerable to strategic manipulation (Gibbard 1973; Satterthwaite 1975; McKelvey 1976). 2. From regular territorial districts, 900 deputies were elected, 84 from au- tonomous ethnic-national territories, and 84 from non-ethnic national territories). 3. The actual term for this position was the President of the Congress, but we use the term Speaker to differentiate it from the office of President of Russia. 4. To receive formal recognition, groups and fractions required a minimum membership of at least 50 deputies. Groups were to be based on "non-political" principles while fractions were explicitly political in nature. Each fraction had the right to name representatives to any committee or other organization of the Congress. Blocs were formed by the alliance of three or more fractions. 5. They assume that budgetary referendum proposals were made by school district superintendents (who were presumably budget.maximizers), even though theses officials were ostensibly subordinate to popularly elected school boards. 6. Utility functions are assumed to have the follo~ing properties: • ui (x) is differentiable for any x • u; (x) > 0 for x < hi ' u; (x) < 0 for x > hi • Ui(x) > 0 for any x • Ui(hi + x) = Uj(hj + x) for any i and j in I ::l,nd for any x 7. In contrast, the core of the simple majority rule game under these same conditions (voters with single-peaked preferences along.a single dimension) is, as Black's 116 theorem tells us, a single point—the ideal point of the median voter. 8. It might seem that the Speaker could propose a Æ* located between and c∖ as it would easily gamer more than two-thirds support. To do so, however, would be a mistake. Even though the Speaker had "gatekeeping" power, i.e., he could simply refrain from offering a proposal once a bill was accepted as background, he could not necessarily prevent amendments horn coming to the floor that would move the bill to the left of c∖ thus making him worse off. 9. If the pivotal voters' utility functions are hat enough, their indifference points (r'(,3°) or r*^(β°)) may be located outside of c^ and c^. In this case the Speaker could obtain any outcome located within the core. 10. NOMINATE maximizes the log likelihood function, which is not the same thing as maximizing correct category predictions. The NOMINATE results we report here are based upon a coding that treats abstentions as missing data. We also scaled the roll call data under the alternative method of coding abstentions as no votes. The resultant scores were very similar to what we obtained in treating abstentions as missing data, but the statistical fit was not as good. 11. See Heckman and Snyder (1992) for an excellent discussion of the relationship between NOMINATE and principal components (factor) analysis. 12. NOMINATE estimates of alternative locations are based upon how accurately the scaled dimensions describe voting patterns: the more accurately the cutpoint discriminates between those who vote "Yes" versus those who vote "No", the farther apart the alternatives are estimated to be. This technique is based upon standard precepts of cognitive psychology, but it is very different from the procedure by which NOMINATE estimates the (normalized) positions of deputies. 13. Romer and Rosenthal assume that the agenda-setter in their model was a budget maximizer, and thus always preferred more than he could extract from the median voter. 14. The number of voting deputies declined from congress to congress due to the death or resignation of some deputies and the inability to replace them in by-elections. 15. According to the figures in Table 6, four of the 55 constitutional bills approved 117 by the RCPD in these two sessions had cutpoints inside of what we had calculated to be the "average" and "reliable" cores. In these cases unusually high turnout acted to malce the edges of the core less extreme. 118 Chapter 3 1. Table 1 as well as our subsequent analyses of the 1995 election groups party lists as follows: the row denoted 'other democrats' consists of B. Federov, Pamfivoliva, and Borovoy's lists, as well as '89', Christian Democrats, and FDD; the row denoted Rybkin and Shakrai (Unity and Accord) includes as well Stable Russia, Block of Independents, and Transition of the Homeland; and the row denoted Derzhava also includes For the Homeland and Power to the People. 2. Notice that the data from one election to the next are not strictly comparable, and that even within the December 1993 election, we have data covering a slightly different set of rayons when comparing the Duma party list elections and the constitutional referendum. Thus, when analyzing pairs of elections, each data set must be readjusted so that it concerns only those rayons for which we have data on both elections. 3. Notice that the usual form of a model intended to be estimated by standard econometric techniques would include an error term, usually additive and assumed to be independently and normally distributed. Here, however, since our variables must sum to a constant, the only source of stochastic error, contrary to our assumption, is variation in the values of our coefficients across the data. A priori, then, we know that any error term will not satisfy the usual assumptions employed to ensure unbiased estimates of coefficients. Unfortunately, there is no way to know the direction of this bias, nor do we know of any procedures for eliminating it. However, dividing our sample into various subpopulations (see this essay's last section) and rerunning our regressions will provide a partial check on the severity of the problem as well as a check for aggregation error. 4. This is not to say that we assume that urban voters have the same preferences as rural ones. That assumption is patently false. Rather, aggregation error can pose a problem if, for instance, urban voters, when they grow disenchanted with reform and Yeltsin, defect to different parties than do rural voters. 5. Although the issue does not arise here, to simplify subsequent tables, coefficients 119 that are not significantly different from zero are reported as 0. 6. Since turnout is greater in 1991 than in April 1993 and since we assume, in effect, that all those who voted in 1993 voted in 1991, there is no 'nonvoter' column in Table 2 - those who failed to vote in 1991 are assumed to have not voted in 1993. Also, turnout in a few rayons (less than 50 in any pair of elections) move in a direction opposite that of the national average and, thus, in a direction inconsistent with our assumption. These rayons are deleted from the analysis. 7. Since invalid ballots in April 1993 are such a small share of the electorate, we delete this column from our presentation. 8. 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