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printSplit-ticket voting in the federal legislative elections:
evidence from the 7th convocation of the State Duma
Gaivoronsky Yu.O.,
HSE University, Moscow, Russia, guyvoronskiy@hse.ru
elibrary_id: 796488 | ORCID: 0000-0002-2905-0031 | RESEARCHER_ID: L-4080-2015
Article received: 2021.05.27. Accepted: 2021.12.26
DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2023.03.09
EDN: KUZGDR
Rubric: Russia today
For citation:
Gaivoronsky Yu.O. Split-ticket voting in the federal legislative elections: evidence from the 7th convocation of the State Duma. – Polis. Political Studies. 2023. No. 3. P. 114-131. (In Russ.). https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2023.03.09. EDN: KUZGDR
Abstract
The article is devoted to split-ticket voting in the 2016 State Duma elections. After the re-introducing of the mixed electoral system, voting for both the list of the party A and a candidate nominated by the party B appears to be popular among the electorates. This fact contradicts the conventional wisdom that institutionalized party systems produce a comparatively small number of split tickets. In this regard, strategic and personal voting hypotheses have been tested to explain the abovementioned election results. Park’s version of Thomsen’s ecological estimator of partisanship has been applied to the case of the federal parliamentary elections in Russia. The lower the partisanship the higher the chances that split-ticket voting will take place. The study has revealed that opposition parties registered after the 2012 party reform have not formed so-called “core” electorates yet. More institutionalized opposition parliamentary parties accompanied by Yabloko have shown the average levels of partisanship. In contrast, only the voters of the party United Russia do not tend to split their tickets. Nevertheless, the party’s ticket splitters make up a significant fraction of the total. As for the hypotheses, the analysis has revealed that the split-ticketing in SMDs is driven by the personal qualities of candidates rather than strategic calculations. The personal vote can be considered as being related to rational expectations of effective representation in this sense. Among such qualities, political experience manifested in professional and electoral dimensions has been the most significant.
Keywords
split-ticket voting, mixed-member proportional representation, Russia, State Duma, political parties, elections.
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Content No. 3, 2023
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The First Russian Electoral System (On How It Was Being Worked Out). – Polis. Political Studies. 1998. No2
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