Local Voters, Local Issues?: Municipal Electoral Behavior under Authoritarianism

• In Event: The Urban Threat: Municipal Politics and Authoritarianism

Abstract

A growing literature on post-communist states suggests that urban electoral and contentious dynamics are key for understanding regime trajectories and ruling party strength. While considerable research exists analyzing subnational politics in post-communist countries and its relation to national politics, our understanding of what drives patterns of political competition and contention at the municipal level remains thin. This lack of knowledge is problematic; while we may know that urban politics often precede important national-level contentious outbursts or electoral shifts, we remain in the dark as to how citizens actually make political choices at this level. This paper exploits data on Moscow’s most recent municipal council elections and a large, highly-salient housing program to examine the determinants of political support at Russia's lowest level of governance: the municipal formation. The Moscow opposition seized this housing project as a campaign issue in 2017, resulting in a significantly increased opposition vote percentage and outright opposition control of many municipal formation councils. Using geodata on the housing project at the polling station level and a hierarchical Dirichlet process model to account for effect heterogeneity, I demonstrate that authoritarian municipal policy drives complex voting patterns that are distinct from those observed at the national level, suggesting the need for more research on specifically urban political events in order to understand how and when the opposition is able to gain subnational power.

Author

• Sean Norton, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill