Assessing Electoral Preferences of United Russia Voters

• In Event: Shaping Public Opinion in Electoral Authoritarian Russia

Abstract

This paper examines the factors influencing electoral preferences of Uniter Russia voters. Based on survey data collected by Levada analytical center in August 2021 this paper answers the question: why do Russian citizens vote for the ruling party and what can challenge their electoral preferences.
In order to do so, a nation-wide survey was conducted a month before federal parliamentary elections of 2021. The list of questions included 15 demographic questions and 12 question on electoral preferences. Based on the received results, two hypothesis were tested. First, it was checked if the public goods provision offered by political party is a similarly important factor for both core and swing voters of United Russia. Secondly, the assumption that private goods target mostly core supporters of the ruling party was tested.
The results shown by logit and probit regression analysis prove the two main hypotheses of this research. First of all, there is a clear relationship between private benefits and probability that a person will become core voter of United Russia. In the survey this was measured through private connections – whether a person assesses their personal ties to party representatives as an important factor in voting decision. In line with what Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros and Estévez (2016) described, core voters are included into the redistribution of private benefits, whereas public goods go to both types of the electorate. This is partly proved by the analysis results – we do not see any significant influence of public goods on probability of being United Russia voter, neither core nor swing one. That can either mean that there is no difference between United Russia voters and voters of other parties in how they perceive public goods for their electoral choices, or that the general provision of public goods in the country is on a very low level (which goes in line with Gel’man’s thesis of bad governance 2021).
Additionally, it was found that electoral inducement from United Russia affects the probability of being a UR voter negatively. At the same time, inducement from regional or local administration affects voting for UR positively. In the recent study by Shkel (2020) it is discovered that the main driving mechanism of political machine’s effectiveness are local elites, as their personal ties with voters provide a reliable guarantee that they will vote for the ruling party.
Thus, we can clearly observe clientelistic practices from the analysis. It means that contrary to popular belief, authoritarian regimes do not just “draw” the desirable electoral results. They actually target certain groups of voters offering them particularistic benefits in exchange for their electoral support. Furthermore, being a part of core supporters of the ruling party is associated with having access to these benefits. This is proved not only by the personal respondents’ assessment of their personal ties’ importance for electoral choice, but also by the significant effect of inducement from the side of regional and local authorities on the probability of being a core voter. On contrary, when it comes to public goods, we do not observe any significant influence of corresponding variables on the type of United Russia voters.

Author

• Viktoriia Poltoratskaia, Central European University