Voting for Russia's Governors: Regional Elections and Accountability under Yeltsin and Putin

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Andrew Konitzer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Austin College, presented findings from his new book, Voting for Russia's Governors: Regional Elections and Accountability under Yeltsin and Putin. Konitzer explained that the goal of his study was to demonstrate the extent to which regional elections in Russia promoted democratic accountability, and to highlight how the system has changed since President Vladimir Putin abolished regional executive elections in 2004.

According to Konitzer, regional executive elections are in principle a good way to promote accountability, because they provide citizens with a specific individual who they can hold responsible for the social and economic condition of their region, and punish or reward accordingly. In practice, however, accountability for regional executives in Russia has been limited by the ability of those executives to influence the outcome of elections through the use of administrative resources. Nevertheless, Konitzer argued, from 1996 to 2001, Russian voters were able to "squeeze out some accountability" from the system. His research, which examined both the motivations of individual voters in the Ulianovsk region and the results of regional elections across the country, demonstrated a correlation between regional economic performance and the success of incumbent candidates. Voters in Ulianovsk were most likely to vote for the incumbent governor if they believed that their region was performing well economically, in comparison with other regions of Russia. At the national level, there was a significant positive correlation between rising wage levels in a region and higher levels of support for incumbent governors.

In 2002, the Putin administration began to implement a package of electoral reforms that were designed to end the period of "wild decentralization" and limit the power of autocratic regional governors. According to Konitzer, many of these reforms looked good on paper and could have been used to increase accountability in regional executive elections. Instead, he argued, the reforms were implemented in a heavy-handed and selective manner that rewarded governors for loyalty to the Kremlin. In practice, Putin commandeered administrative resources from the governors and then redistributed them to incumbents and challengers who had aligned themselves with United Russia, Konitzer said. Between 2002 and 2004, United Russia-backed candidates were quite successful in regional executive elections, but they also experienced a small number of politically costly losses. Konitzer argued that by 2004, the Kremlin had decided that popular elections for regional executives were too great a constraint on central control of the regions.

The announcement of the end of popular elections for regional executives provoked a range of responses—from those who felt that it was high time for the center to reassert control over the regions, to those who feared that it was the next step in the creation of an authoritarian state in Russia. Konitzer argued that ending popular regional executive elections was essentially undemocratic, giving the Kremlin the opportunity to appoint political supporters as regional governors, regardless of their appeal to residents or their ability to manage a regional government. Nevertheless, Konitzer said, the most dire predictions have so far not come to pass. Putin has used his new power with caution and has not made dramatic changes to the status quo. Of the 47 regional executives who have come up for reappointment, 70 percent have been reappointed, and of those who were replaced, many had come to the end of their term limit, retired, or died. The majority of governors are now United Russia members and Kremlin supporters, Konitzer explained, but this process began well before regional elections were abolished.