This study examines the extent to which the nationalization of the vote has occurred in Russia since 1993. To what extent is the Russian party vote “nationalized”, or in other words, to what extent are there differences between the national party vote and the party vote in the various regions of the country? What explains why such variations exist? To answer these questions, I examine a number of factors (the strength of the local executive, the degree to which local parties are entrenched, etc.) that explain why party politics in certain regions in Russia are characterized by a more “nationalized” vote than others.

In recent years much has been written on the communist successor parties. Although much of the existent work focuses on the electoral performance of these parties or has described, in great detail, the development of single parties, this paper evaluates the utility of theories of party identity change in application to the successor parties. As an initial exploration we investigate the successor parties’ programs before and after the initial competitive parliamentary elections in Hungary (in 1990), Poland (in 1991) and Russia (in 1993) to determine the extent to which poor electoral performance in initial competitive elections compelled the successor parties to alter their political identities.

Recently, scholars have debated the effects of presidentialism on the development of new democracies. We seek to add to this debate by: (1) extending the investigation to the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; (2) employing an interval measure of presidential power as opposed to previously used categorical measures of presidentialism; (3) testing the relationships between institutions and democratic consolidation using multivariate rather than bivariate analytical techniques. In sum, the evidence suggested that the electoral system had a greater effect than either the power of the constitutional president or socio–cultural or economic factors on various measures of democracy and consolidation.

This article examines the nomination choices of the major Russian political parties for the single-member districts in the ethnic republics for the December 1993 and December 1995 State Duma elections. Using western-based theories on party behavior in multi-ethnic societies, this article tests several hypotheses relating to the factors which affect where parties were active and examines the different recruitment strategies of individual parties. In general, it was found that the Russian proto-parties tended to be most active in urban and predominantly Russian areas of the republics. However, there were differences between the parties, with notable parties more likely to recruit non-Russian elites to their banners as opposed to program parties. Moreover, when comparing across time, the party which most increased its recruitment of non-Russian elites from 1993 to 1995 was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).

The behavior of political parties in transitional elections is a singularly important element in a successful democratic transition. In ethnically cleaved countries, the actions taken by political parties in transitional elections can have especially longstanding consequences for future political conflict. This article examines the impact of a particularly unique electoral experiment in Eastern Europe, the single transferable vote system (STV) in Estonia, on the nominating strategies of different types of political parties (the multi-ethnic Popular Front of Estonia—PFE; the non-ethnic Communist Party of Estonia—CPE; and the ethnically based Russian Party—OSTK) in the initial republic-wide legislative elections held on March 18, 1990. A basic analysis is conducted to test the effects of varying district magnitude (a characteristic of STV), ethnic composition of electoral districts, and the “gate-keeper” effect exerted by structured political parties on transitional party nomination strategies in the Estonian election of 1990. Contrary to existing literature on STV, varying district magnitude did not have a great effect on the nominating strategies of either large parties or ethnically particular ones. Moreover, little in the way of gate-keeper effect was exercised by the communist party on the ethnically particular nominating strategy of the Russian OSTK.