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Why Not Parties? Electoral Markets, Party Substitutes, and Stalled Democratization in RussiaAuthor(s): Henry E. HaleSource: Comparative Politics, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Jan., 2005), pp. 147-166Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New YorkStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072880 .

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Why Not Parties?

Electoral Markets, Party Substitutes, and Stalled

Democratization in Russia

Henry E. Hale

Comparative studies have stressed two fundamental factors that drive the process of

political party development: prominent social cleavages and state (especially elec

toral) institutions. While some have divided theorists into "cleavage" and "institu

tional" camps, most leading scholars have in fact held that both combine to shape the evolution of parties despite variations in emphasis. Their and other classic works

also share an assumption that politicians have incentive to organize collectively in

parties in order to achieve political ends and that these activities are conditioned,

channeled, and ultimately rendered successful or unsuccessful by social cleavages and institutions. Leading scholars differ, however, on whether strong parties are an

equilibrium result in societies first making the transition to democracy. While

Duverger and many after him have stressed the power of incentives from cleavages and institutions over time to impel politicians to form dynamic and programmatic

parties, others like Kitschelt place more emphasis on transitional factors and

sociopolitical institutional legacies that can inhibit the development of strong, pro

grammatic parties.1

While both of these approaches to transitional party development clearly capture

important parts of the story, it is argued here that both can be usefully supplemented in the many countries of the world where law permits candidates to run as indepen dents (that is, without party affiliation). In these systems, parties will fully penetrate electoral politics only when virtually all serious candidates for office find it in their

interest to run as party nominees rather than as independents. In such a situation, candidates are effectively consumers of goods and services that will help them con

nect with voters in order to be elected. Parties can be seen as suppliers who emerge to meet this candidate demand. Most theories typically stop here, looking only at

parties as potential suppliers. Basic economic theory, however, says that production decisions for any good (an outcome of supply and demand) are not made in a per

fectly isolated market involving only that particular good, but in the context of

broader markets in which demand for this good can be dampened by competition from "substitute" goods that can meet some or most of the same needs, if imperfect

ly.2 Thus, in the realm of transitional polities, when parties are seemingly stunted in

their growth, the reason may lie in the existence of "party substitutes" that are able

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Comparative Politics January 2005

to out-compete parties in the provision of electoral goods and services under certain

market conditions. The implication is that explicit theoretical attention must be paid not only to the incentives that institutions, social cleavages, and sociopolitical lega cies provide to political parties and those who would lead or join them, but also to

the way these same structures interact with variation in local patterns of meso-level resource concentration that can provide the basis for party substitutes. Paying explic it theoretical attention to such factors promises to improve the accuracy of predic tions (and explanations) of party development in many transitional societies.

The potential of market logic can be illustrated by applying it to an important

empirical puzzle that has left area specialists and comparative theorists divided: the case of political party development in Russia. Some researchers insist that Russian

parties are weak and stagnating, pointing to their lack of penetration of state organs and apparently weak regional organizations. Others argue that Russia's parties are

growing and are already quite strong for a country at its stage of democratization,

citing survey evidence that voters increasingly base their electoral choices on party

signals and that "transitional" party identification is steadily emerging. The market

approach makes it possible to see how, in an important sense, both camps are right.

Party loyalties and organization are in fact emerging, but parties have failed to close

out the electoral market and penetrate state organs less because they face the wrong institutional or societal incentives than because they face stiff competition from

other forms of political organization (party substitutes). The power of this model is

demonstrated by examining the impact of two important forms of party substitute,

provincial political machines and politicized financial-industrial groups, on party

development in the single member district (or simply district) elections to the

Russian parliament (Duma) in 1999. Quantitative analysis of an original dataset on

candidates and voting in these elections lends confirmation to this answer to the puz zle.

Conceptualizing the Electoral Market

In countries with electoral systems that allow candidates to run for office as inde

pendents, including the United States and India, party penetration of the political

system requires the vast majority of promising candidates to choose to run for office

as party nominees. In such systems, it is reasonable to make several assumptions in

developing theory. Voters vote for candidates who they think will represent their

interests (broadly conceived). Candidates, in turn, want to be elected and thus com

pete to show voters that they can best represent voter interests.3 Also, a relatively

plentiful supply of people will decide to run for office for any number of reasons, as

Cox notes is often the case in new democracies.4 Candidates' desires to gain votes

lead them to want political goods and services that help them get elected.

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Henry E. Hale

Political parties are a particularly important supplier of these goods and services

demanded by candidates. A party is defined here, after work by Sartori and

Schattschneider, as an enduring association of people who identify themselves by a

public label and who are joined together under this label for the primary purpose of

winning control of the government by means of presenting their own candidates in

elections for public office on the basis of a common platform.5 Comparative theoret

ical research has focused on three major electoral benefits that parties are said to

provide to candidates: organizational support, reputation (a "brand name"), and

material resources.6

These dynamics, taken together, constitute a kind of market. The "demand side"

of the production equation in the market for electoral goods and services includes

those factors affecting the amount of electoral goods and services that candidates

(consumers) are willing to buy from parties at a given price. The "supply side" refers

to factors that affect the amount of electoral goods and services that producers (in this case, parties) are willing to supply to candidates at a given price.7 Parties operat

ing in this market face some important constraints. For one thing, the number of

nominations they can meaningfully supply is limited by the number of districts and

mandates at stake in the election. Parties' provision of electoral goods and services is

also constrained by costs associated with building organization, eliciting collective

action, and developing reputation, none of which can be taken for granted.8 Even once parties are created, they always face real limits on the amount of resources they can mobilize to respond to competition in any one campaign. Competition is also

imperfect, in part because the goods proffered by political parties are not exactly the same. Some specialize in "ideational" goods (reputation) in which brand name dis

tinctions are critical, whereas others concentrate more on "administrative" products such as campaign services and financing.9

It would be a mistake to try to predict the size of the "party industry" (that is, the

degree to which parties are created and become important suppliers of electoral

goods and services) by focusing exclusively on parties as the producers of electoral

goods and services demanded by candidates. The demand side of a market equation reflects not simply the desire for a good potentially on the market, but also the avail

ability and relative price of substitutes for these goods.10 As the price for the good in

question rises, more people will turn to available substitutes that can satisfy the same

basic demand, albeit imperfectly. If the price of a cappuccino goes up, price-sensitive consumers may decide to settle for a regular coffee rather than absorb the new addi

tional cost of the fancier beverage. In the context of political party development, the

implication is that one must look not only at factors affecting the supply of and

demand for party-provided goods and services when estimating levels of party

development, but also at the potential availability of substitutes for these electoral

goods and services. To be sure, there is no reason to believe that parties are the only institutional forms capable of providing organizational support, reputation, and

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material resources. It is therefore necessary to be aware of the possibility of party substitutes. A critical implication is that parties will close out the electoral market,

coming to dominate the democratic system, only when they establish themselves as

the sole credible suppliers of electoral goods and services. Likewise, parties can fail

to close out the electoral market even when they are in fact successful and powerful

providers of electoral goods and services; if party substitutes prove to be equally

mighty, candidates may continue to choose them even over strong political parties. Sources of cross-national variation in the strength of party substitutes vis-?-vis

parties are beyond the scope of the present analysis. Nevertheless, it can be briefly noted here that the degree to which party substitutes successfully compete against

political parties will depend on the nature of party substitutes available in a given

society, which in turn hinges on the particular pattern of concentration of those polit ical and economic resources that can potentially be mobilized for electoral purposes. In particular, the transition from what Kitschelt and his coauthors have called "patri

monial communist" regimes has tended to produce certain clientelistic regional social institutions and resource clusters that have proven to facilitate the rise of party substitutes in these more than in other postcommunist countries.11 It is crucial to

note, however, that the availability of party substitutes will also be directly affected

by the nature of political, including electoral, institutions. Indeed, proportional repre sentation systems typically rule out independent candidacies, effectively granting

parties a monopoly on ballot access, whereas most single member district systems do not.

Party Development in Russia

Russia is interesting as a case study of the market model not only because it is an

emerging democracy with single member districts, but also because it has generated a great deal of disagreement over how to interpret developments in its party sys tem.12 If the market model can help reconcile these positions, it will have demon

strated impressive explanatory power and will provide prima facie grounds for test

ing the model in other contexts.

On the one hand, broadly consistent with comparative scholars like Kitschelt who

argue that postcommunist political and social legacies often militate against strong

programmatic parties, a vast body of research argues (or even takes for granted) that

Russian parties are weak.13 Governors ran for reelection as party nominees only 3

percent of the time during the period 1995-2000; the mean share of a region's legis lators elected through party nomination was just 12 percent in the period 1995-2000; and less than 50 percent of the deputies chosen in the 1999 district

Duma elections were major party nominees.14 Some cite the frequent appearance

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Henry E. Hale

and disappearance of parties from election to election and signs that parties lack

regional structures or programmatic platforms.15

Parties are said to be underdeveloped for the following reasons. Voters are suspi cious of the very idea of "party" after their experience with Communist Party rule.16

The Soviet regime destroyed the social cleavages and related social infrastructure

that are said, following Lipset and Rokkan, to give birth to parties, and the transition

has failed to create stable new ones.17 Russian political institutions do not provide the proper incentives for party formation.18 Few organizational resources are avail

able for party leaders to use to build structure.19 A rise in postmaterialist values, the

atomizing effects of television, and other factors related to "modern European soci

ety" have weakened parties in Russia, just as they have driven a decline of parties in

European politics.20 Russia's governors have intentionally kept them weak, so as, for

example, to protect personal interests in "partial reform."21 Potential activists have

too little economic opportunity available to them and thus tend not to take the politi cal risks involved in party building.22 Russian President Boris Yeltsin's personal decision to neglect or subvert party formation nipped Russian parties in the bud.23

And Russia's particular form of postcommunist transition has produced an "oli

garchic capitalism" in which those with resources do not need parties and those

without them are too fragmented and disoriented to organize parties effectively.24 On the other hand, a different group of scholars, extending the perspective of

those comparative theorists who stress the tendency of structural incentives to pro duce strong parties, have provided systematic (mostly survey-based) evidence for the

following arguments.25 Russia's parties distinguish themselves clearly in the minds

of voters on the basis of issues.26 Voters are in fact choosing parties based on these

issue positions.27 Partisan voting patterns are grounded in postcommunist social

cleavages, as the classic Lipset-Rokkan framework would predict.28 Party loyalties are forming in the Russian population.29 This "transitional partisanship" is one of the

most important determinants of voting in Russia.30 Party activists show signs of

being ideological "true believers" rather than mere political opportunists.31 Parties

act in a distinctly coherent manner in the Duma, influencing the activities of legisla tors in important ways.32

There are several reasons why Russian parties might show consistent signs of

weakness at the same time many find evidence that they are taking root in mass

political culture. For one thing, some of the "pessimistic" studies were based on

older evidence from Russia's first multiparty parliamentary elections (1993). Second, most of the optimistic analyses are based on mass surveys of potential Russian voters, whereas most of the pessimists focus on macropolitical outcomes

(such as low party penetration of provincial organs). Third, perhaps as a result, these

researchers may be implying different definitions of party "strength" and "weak

ness." Survey research can tap into mass attitudes about parties but can not directly

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assess the relative capacity of party organizations themselves. Studies of macro out

comes without micro-level data usually can not rule out the possibility that low party

penetration of state organs and high party volatility might result from factors other

than thin party organization, undeveloped reputation, or even a lack of popular sup

port. The pattern of evidence cited by the two camps, in fact, suggests that both

interpretations might be largely right. Parties may enjoy significant resonance in the

population and be coherent organizationally at the same time that forces other than

intrinsic weakness hinder them from actually dominating elections and the political

system more generally.

To test the interpretation that party substitutes can help account for the many

apparent signs of Russian party weakness, this article focuses on two particular kinds of party substitute: governors' political machines and politicized financial

industrial groups. They are appropriate as case studies because they are sufficiently

powerful and interested in electoral outcomes that they should behave as party sub

stitutes if the market model is to be helpful at all. While it may not be surprising for

Russia-watchers to learn that governors or "oligarchic" groups matter, it would be

striking to show that Russian party weakness is in part a result of these party substi

tutes' own political strength and not, as many Russia specialists have believed, a con

sequence of parties' own failures to organize or connect with voters due to postcom munist Russian political culture or perverse electoral institutional incentives.

This article seeks primarily to establish the usefulness and promise of the theoret

ical approach, leaving more comprehensive, cross-national testing to other work. It is

appropriate, then, to focus here on the case of the 1999 district Duma elections.33

Russia employs a mixed parliamentary election system, with 225 seats distributed

among party lists according to proportional representation and another 225 seats

allocated in district elections. While most studies of the relationship between parti

sanship and voting behavior in Duma elections have focused on the proportional rep resentation half, the only candidates voters can select there are partisan.34 Voters in

the district elections, in contrast, have the option of casting ballots for independent instead of party candidates. Partisan votes in district races thus reflect a choice to

"go partisan," not a lack of an affirmative alternative as is the case in the party list

contest.35 The district Duma elections, therefore, are well suited to testing a theory of party development that treats party votes and party affiliation as something to be

explained, not taken for granted. While one could also examine other single member district elections in Russia,

Duma races have certain advantages as a case study. Unlike regional executive and

legislative elections, they take place across the whole of Russia on the very same

day, helping to control for timing-related factors. Moreover, Duma contests feature

far greater numbers of districts and candidates than elections for any other Russian

organ taken individually. They thus foster greater confidence that observed patterns

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are not merely random. The 1999 Duma election cycle, Russia's third, is appropriate to study because parties had had some time to develop reputations and organization,

making it possible to test whether their failure to dominate the electoral market has

more to do with their own intrinsic or strategic failings or, as suggested here, compe tition from party substitutes. Finally, the 1999 district Duma races are an appropriate case study because the necessary data are available to examine patterns of party behavior and party substitutes.

Suppliers on Russia's Electoral Market

There is good reason to believe that governors' political machines and politicized financial-industrial groups do in fact compete with parties to provide at least some

of the three main electoral goods and services that theorists usually assume parties

provide (organization, reputation, and material resources).

Governors' Political Machines The collapse of the Soviet regime and Russia's

transition from Communist rule left a great deal of power in the hands of the leaders

(to whom I refer broadly as "governors") of Russia's eighty-nine federal regions.36

By 1999 virtually all governors were chosen in direct popular elections and had built

up some very powerful political machines capable of providing locally many of the same political goods and services that parties are expected to provide, often much

more effectively than parties themselves.37 Strong governors had the most powerful local organizations in Russia, consisting of strict hierarchies of executive officials, all beholden to the governor for their jobs and kept in line by locally controlled secu

rity structures. Governors could also provide material resources on a large scale

since they typically strictly regulated major financial flows in their regions through state ownership of local enterprises, fiscal levers, the coercive use of license-issuing

authority, inspections, and other powers. While governors did not usually develop brand names and symbols that could help more directly associate a candidate with a

governor's reputation, they could appear frequently with their candidates on local

media or (illegally) send their representatives to polling places to influence voters.

These regional political machines could not be called parties themselves because

they did not express their primary aims in terms of an explicit label encompassing their candidates and did not develop public and coherent platforms on which their

candidates ran. These functions are some of the very ones that lead scholars to con

sider parties vital for democratic development and state stability. Explicit labels and

public platforms, for example, are critical in efficiently organizing choice for voters

and facilitating accountability.38 For the purpose of examining broad patterns, when terms such as "gubernatorial

support" are used here, they refer to any form of action on the part of the governor

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designed to promote the victory of one particular candidate in any given election

contest. While future studies may gain comprehensive access to data on the different means that different governors use to back their favorites, this analysis is forced to

limit itself to looking only at patterns of who is supported regardless of how the sup

port is manifested. The core data on gubernatorial backing come from the East-West

Institute, which asked its network of Russian regional observers to identify the can

didate (if any) whom the governor supported in each Duma district in 1999.39 These

data were supplemented by identifying explicit statements that a given governor sup

ported a given candidate in two additional sources: reports from Radio Svoboda's

extensive (if not comprehensive) reporting on the Duma district races and summary information on these contests made available to the author but prepared for internal

use by a major Russian political party.40 Where at least one of these sources clearly identified a candidate as being supported by a governor and no other source contra

dicted this assessment, the candidate was coded as being governor-backed. In those

thirteen districts where at least one source contradicted at least one other source,

judgment calls were made based on the content of their reports. When there was

insufficient information in these reports to make a judgment, preference was given to the East-West Institute assessments, since its evaluative process was the most sys tematic.41

According to this data collection exercise, a governor backed a candidate in 181

of the 224 districts in the 1999 Duma elections, and most of this support was not

partisan in nature.42 Only nineteen of the eighty-eight governors were found in this

exercise to have supported a single party's nominees in more than half of their Duma

districts. The remaining governors either backed nominees from multiple (sometimes

opposing) parties in different districts, were not observed backing any candidate in a

large share of their districts, or, most frequently, supported candidates who were not

major party nominees. Of course, a candidate's ideal strategy would be to obtain

support from both a major party and a governor, something that the data indicate one

candidate successfully did in 39 percent of the districts.

Politicized Financial-Industrial Groups Starting with the USSR's legacy of large state industrial conglomerates, Russia's privatization process left intact huge monop olies controlling immense financial flows. These concentrations of resources formed

the basis for a series of financial-industrial groups that by the late 1990s had the

potential and the will to have a major impact on Russian politics. While some

observers have focused on financial-industrial groups' indirect role as sponsors of

political parties and individual candidates, perhaps their most interesting role is as

party substitutes in electoral politics.43 For the first time with the 1999 parliamentary election cycle, several major financial-industrial groups made conscious decisions

not to work primarily through alliances with a political party or to seek political

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influence exclusively through the lobbying of legislators that had already been elect

ed. Instead, they compiled secret slates of their "own" district candidates in the 1999

Duma elections to elect maximally loyal and sizable representations in the new par liament.

Politicized financial-industrial groups have tended to rival political parties in pro

viding candidates with organization and especially material resources, although they have usually been (intentionally) weaker than parties in lending their candidates a

brand-name reputation since they want to avoid a public image of corruption. Politicized financial-industrial groups themselves are not parties because their pri

mary organizational purpose is economic; they do not seek to govern or to win out

right control of the polity, because their candidates typically do not publicly run on

the basis of the company label and because they usually do not make known the

"platform" that is the company's condition for lending them support. National politicized financial-industrial groups reputed to have their own district

candidate lists in the 1999 Duma race included Transneft, LUKoil, Russian

Aluminum, and the Interros Group, many of which were associated with some of

Russia's most prominent business "oligarchs." While in many cases these companies backed loyal local notables, top leaders of major financial-industrial groups at times even ran for office themselves. Some of the most impressive candidate resumes were

advanced by SibNeft' coowner Roman Abramovich, Logovaz Group owner Boris

Berezovsky, Slavneft' head Vasily Duma, and ONAKO chief Rem Khramov, all of

whom ran as independents. Of equal or often greater importance in many regions in

1999 were regional financial-industrial groups, sometimes linked to national ones

but often in competition with them in particular districts.

While evidence is less forthcoming than for governors, the internal party report and to a lesser extent Radio Svoboda and written accounts of the campaign process

produced by the East-West Institute's observers frequently indicated politicized financial-industrial group involvement in the district Duma contests.44 A candidate

was coded as being a politicized financial-industrial group candidate if reports from at least one source met two criteria: there was evidence not merely of a link between a candidate and a major firm but of the active support of the leadership of the firm

for the candidate's run for office (counting a run by the firm's CEO or owner as

"active support"); the firm in question was either national in scope or a major part of

a region's economy (such as the automobile giant KamAZ in Tatarstan), not an ordi

nary factory.45 Due to the often secretive nature of politicized financial-industrial

group activity, it is not possible to be certain that the dataset has captured all recipi ents of politicized financial-industrial group support, so these results must be treated

as only a preliminary cut.46

Politicized financial-industrial groups were found to have backed a total of seven

ty-seven candidates in 1999. While this figure is a only a small share of the 2,226 candidates on the ballot in this election, they competed in sixty-one separate dis

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tricts, thereby being in a position to affect a quarter of the contests. When politicized financial-industrial groups are combined with governors (one of whom covers each

district), party substitutes as a whole were in a position to influence party prospects and associated election outcomes significantly. Indeed, like governors, politicized financial-industrial groups tended to operate independently of the major political

parties. Of the seventy-seven politicized financial-industrial group candidates, only

twenty-eight also happened to be nominated by a political party.

A Statistical Test

If the market model accurately captures a real dynamic, empirical support should be

found for the following three hypotheses in data on the 1999 Duma elections. (1) Candidates nominated by a major party should have tended to get larger percentages of the vote than those without such a nomination, ceteris paribus. (2) Candidates

with the active backing of major party substitutes (governor's political machines and

politicized financial-industrial groups) should have tended to get larger percentages of the vote than those without this backing, ceteris paribus. (3) There should be a

negative correlation between the vote totals of gubernatorial political machine candi

dates and the vote totals of party nominees across those districts where governors do

not back party candidates.

Hypotheses 1 and 2: Method To test the first two hypotheses, two regressions were run using the dataset described above, which includes information on all candi

dates competing in the 1999 district elections to the Duma.47 For both regressions the percentage of the district vote that each district candidate won in the election is

the quantity to be explained. To test the first two hypotheses directly, dummy vari

ables were included indicating nomination by Russia's seven major parties as of

1999 (Communist Party, Fatherland-All Russia, LDPR, Our Home is Russia, Union

of Right Forces, Unity, Yabloko) as well as active support by the two party substi

tutes in focus here (governor, politicized financial-industrial group). See the

Appendix for a more technical explication of the employed method.

There are at least two reasons why hypotheses 1 and 2 might be true, however.

For one thing, parties, governors' political machines, and politicized financial-indus

trial groups are expected to improve the vote-getting capacity of their candidates.

The market model also anticipates that parties and party substitutes will compete for

candidate recruitment, seeking to attract the candidates that are a priori most likely to get the most votes. Strong parties in developed democracies are widely held to do

both. To the extent that a party or party substitute is strong, therefore, it should be

expected to display a mix of "making vote-winners" and "attracting vote-winners."

While the specific ratio of "making" to "attracting" is not of particular importance

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to the present argument, it should be reasonably established that at least some signif icant "making" is going on. It is also important, however, to rule out a third possibil

ity not anticipated by the market theory, that strong candidates are coming forward on their own and that parties or party substitutes are then simply "rubber-stamping" them, lending them no significant electoral support.

In two ways, this statistical analysis isolates the degree to which parties and gov ernors are "making" rather than "attracting" or "rubber-stamping" vote-winners.

First, it includes a series of control variables that indicate whether a given candidate

possesses certain traits or personal resources that might be expected to lead to elec

toral success regardless of that candidate's affiliations or backers.48 These controls

capture whether a candidate was an incumbent Duma deputy (elected either in the

district or in the proportional representation half of the voting); a state official (at the

federal, regional, or local level); a regional or local legislator; or primarily employed in the military, the intelligentsia, agriculture, politics (as with full-time party lead

ers), blue-collar (proletarian) work, sports (sometimes linked to mafia groups), the

railroad industry (associated with a shadowy Kremlin network), or private business

(as distinct from politicized financial-industrial groups in the way described above

and in note 45). A variable coding gender (female) is also incorporated into the

analysis, as are variables indicating nomination by the three minor parties that round

out Russia's top ten vote-getters in the 1999 proportional representation competition: Communists for the USSR, Women of Russia, and the Pensioners Party.

The second way in which this analysis controls for the personal strength of candi

dates so as to isolate the effects of parties and party substitutes is to include a variable

that indicates whether regional experts considered particular candidates to be "key contenders" prior to the election. The East-West Institute, in a predictive exercise, asked its network of Russian regional observers to identify candidates who were key contenders in nearly every district prior to the election. These predictions were then

augmented with similar assessments conducted in a large number of districts by Radio Svoboda's regional correspondents and in almost all districts by a political

party whose internal data were made available to the author. Candidates were thus

coded as contenders if any one of these three sources named the candidate as a realis

tically possible winner or a primary challenger. These expert assessments should be

expected to capture more intangible but very important candidate assets like charis

ma, popularity, and name recognition, as well as tangible assets like personal wealth

that might be known locally but may not be evident from a candidate's official biogra

phy. To the extent that candidates backed by parties or party substitutes perform better

than candidates with similar biographies above and beyond local expert expectations, it can be said with a great deal of confidence that these forms of political organization contribute directly to their candidates' success and are not succeeding only in candi

date recruitment (or in identifying good candidates to rubber-stamp). It is critical to note, however, that the text of the reports filed by many of these

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correspondents indicated that they judged candidate prospects not solely by their per sonal assets, but also by the backing of strong parties or party substitutes.

Regressions including the contender control variable, therefore, are likely to under

state the real level of party and party substitute vote-winning capacity in the district

elections. These regressions, then, are best interpreted as establishing a lower bound

to the real average degree to which parties and party substitutes were helping candi

dates win votes, with an upper bound provided by those equations that do not include

this control variable. For this reason, both sets of results are reported in Table 1 :

columns 1(a) and 1(b) leave out the contender control, and columns 2(a) and 2(b) include it.49

Table 1 Correlates of Candidate Performance in the 1999 Duma District Elections

Party Substitutes Governor PFIG

Major Parties Communist Party Yabloko Union of Right Forces Fatherland-All Russia Unity LDPR Our Home is Russia

Controls Communists for USSR Women of Russia Pensioners Party Incumbent (SMD) Incumbent (PR)

Military Intelligentsia

Agriculture Politics Proletarian Federal Official Regional Official

Regional Legislator Mayor Local Official Local Legislator Railroad

Sports Business Female Number

Experts See as Contender F? N *

p<J0 ** p <.05 ***

p<.01

1(a) 1(b) Impact of factor on % district vote (95% confidence Coefficient interval}_ (standard error)

11.7 (9.2,14.2) 83 (5.7,11.2)

9.9 (7.9,12.0) 5.4(3.5,7.4) 6.9 (4.8,9.2) 6.9 (4.8,9.0)

10.7 (6.9,15.0) -0.5 (-1.5,0.4) -03 (-1.6,1.0)

1.32 (.09)*** 1.00 (.12)***

1.17 (.08)*** 0.72 (.10)*** 0.88 (.10)*** 0.88 (.10)*** 1.20 (.17)***

- 0.10 (.07) -0.05 (.11)

2.2 (-0.3,5.3) 5.1 (2.2,8.9) 33 (1.0,5.6)

10.1 (7.9,12.7) 4.1 (2.2,6.2) 1.1 (-1.0,3.6)

-0.2 (-1.1,0.8) 4.2 (0.6,8.7)

-03 (-1.6,1.1) 03 (-1.7,2.8) 03 (-1.4,2.3) 3.4 (1.3,6.0) 5.4 (3.5,7.4) 2.9 (0.4,6.0) 0.6 (-1.7,3.4) 1.8 (0.4,3.4) 5.0 (0.2,11.1)

-0.8 (-2.7,1.6) -0.8 (-1.7,0.3) 0.6 (-0.4, 1.6)

-9.6 (-11.0,-8.3)

0.32 (.16)* 0.68 (.18)*** 0.45 (.13)*** 1.18 (.10)***

0.58 (.12)*** 0.17 (.17) 0.04 (.07) 0.58 (.26)** 0.06 (.10) 0.05 (.18) 0.05 (.14) 0.49 (.14)*** 0.74 (.10)*** 0.42 (.17)** 0.09 (.20) 0.28 (.09)*** 0.63 (.31)** 0.17 (.19) 0.13 (.07)* 0.09 (.06) 0.09 (.01)***

0.46 2,207

2(a) 2(b) Impact of factor on % district vote (95% confidence Coefficient interval)_ (Standard error)

7.1 (5.3,9.2) 53 (3.2,7.5)

0.92 (.09)*** 0.71 (.12)***

8.4(6.7,10.1) 1.03 (.08)* 3.7 (2.1,5.4) 5.6 (3.8,7.7) 2.7 (1.1,4.3) 4.6 (1.8,7.6)

-03 (-1.2,0.6) -0.5 (-1.5,0.8)

0.53 (.10)*** 0.75 (.10)*** 0.40 (.10)*** 0.62 (.17)***

-0.06 (.07) -0.10 (.10)

2.0 (-0.2,4.9) 3.7 (1.4,6.2) 4.1 (1.9,6.7) 3.7 (2.0,5.5)

-0.4 (-1.8,1.1) 1.2 (-0.7,3.6) 0.0 (-0.9, .01) 4.8 (1.1,9.5)

-03 (-1.4,1.0) 0.8 (-1.2,3.1) 0.4 (-1.2,2.0) 2.9 (1.1,5.1) 4.1 (2.5,5.8) 1.9 (-0.1,4.0) 0.6 (-1.4,3.2) 1.9 (0.4,3.4) 6.0 (0.9,12.3)

-0.6 (-2.6,1.7) -0.6 (-1.5,0.3) 0.6 (-0.3,1.5)

-9.0 (-10.4,-7.7) 7.0(5.5,8.5)

0.31 (.18)* 0.53 (.15)*** 0.57 (.14)*** 0.54 (.10)*** -0.09 (.13) 0.18 (.15) 0.01 (.07) 0.63 (.24)*** - 0.06 (.10) 0.12 (.18) 0.06 (.13) 0.43 (.13)*** 0.59 (.10)*** 0.29 (.15)* 0.08 (.19) 0.29 (.10)*** 0.74 (.30)**

- 0.12 (.21) -0.10 (.07) 0.10 (.06)

-0.09 (.01)*** 1.01 (.08)***

0.51 2,207

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Hypotheses 1 and 2: Results Attention is first drawn to the bolded columns of

Table 1, which report the estimated magnitude of the impact of the different parties and party substitutes (and control factors) on the vote totals likely to be won by oth

erwise average candidates in their districts. Most strikingly, both parties and party substitutes are found to have played large roles in Russia's 1999 district elections,

confirming hypotheses 1 and 2. An average Duma candidate who gained the backing of an average governor in 1999 could accordingly expect to win, on average, an

additional 7.1 to 11.7 percent more of the district's vote, with the difference between

the figures in 1(a) and 2(a) depending on whether experts' assessments of candi

dates' prospects were controlled. Similarly, politicized financial-industrial groups were associated with a mean electoral bump of between 5.3 and 8.3 percent.

Table 1 also reports strong evidence that parties, too, provided significant elec

toral support for their candidates. That Communist Party nomination was correlated

with an electoral boost of nearly ten percentage points is perhaps the least surprising

finding given the undisputed strength of the party's organization and brand name.

More remarkably, nominees of the strongest liberal-market parties, Yabloko and the

Union of Right Forces, tended to garner 3.7-5.4 and 5.6-6.9 percent more of the

vote, respectively, than did otherwise similar candidates. Given that over two-fifths

of the 1999 district Duma races were decided by 7 percent of the vote or less and

that roughly half of these races involved winning margins of 3 percent or less, the

electoral advantage associated here with major party nomination appears quite sig nificant in real world terms. Also surprising is the clear finding that the nominees of

parties often presented as purely dependent on friendly governors and lacking in

independent organization and reputation, Fatherland-All Russia and Unity, systemat

ically outperformed other candidates with similar biographies by average margins of

2.7-6.9 and 4.6-10.7 percent, respectively, even controlling for gubernatorial sup

port. Two major parties had no significant effect on their nominees' chances:

Vladimir Zhirinovsky's LDPR (which initially went out of its way to include reputed criminals on its party list in what appears to have been a fundraising tactic) and Our

Home Is Russia (the party of former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, widely believed responsible for the Russian financial collapse of 1998).

Table 1 also indicates that it can be concluded with a high degree of confidence

that parties and party substitutes both mattered. The parenthesized figures in

columns 1(a) and 2(a) report 95 percent confidence intervals. Thus, given this infor

mation, it can be said with 95 percent confidence that an average governor's backing

brings an average district candidate somewhere between 9.2 and 14.2 percent more

of the district's vote. In no instance does "zero impact" fall into the range of possi bilities in which there is 95 percent confidence for the five most important parties discussed in the previous paragraph or for the two forms of party substitute consid

ered here. While the figures in the columns labeled (b) need not be of concern here

(see the Appendix for interpretation), it is important to note the patterns of asterisks:

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the presence of three asterisks by the figures for both kinds of party substitutes and

the five key parties indicates that, if the real effects of these forms of political orga nization were in fact zero, the likelihood that patterns would have taken the form that

they actually did would be less than 1 percent. The control variables also identify some interesting patterns. Perhaps most impor

tant, the expert predictors were generally accurate; they successfully identified can

didates that received, on average, 7 percent more of the vote than would have been

predicted by the "objective" factors included directly in the equation. This accuracy lends credence to the argument that the expert assessment variable captures candi

dates' "personal votes" reasonably effectively and thus that the remaining correlation

found between vote shares and party nomination or party substitute backing reflects

their "making," rather than just "attracting" or "rubber-stamping," of vote-winners.

Adding to the conclusion that parties matter, some of Russia's minor parties were

even correlated with slightly better than expected showings for their district candi

dates. Russia also appears to feature a significant incumbent advantage, especially for district-elected incumbents who earned a mean 3.7 to 10.1 percent more of the

vote than did otherwise similar candidates. Candidates employed in agriculture, in

the railroad industry, or as regional officials, regional legislators, mayors, or local

legislators also performed better than did other candidates who differed only in lack

ing these jobs. Finally, there is some slight evidence that voters reacted negatively to

simple business representatives (those not from politicized financial-industrial

groups) seeking to win office.

Hypothesis 3: Method To confirm the third hypothesis, there must be evidence that

parties are failing to close out the electoral market at least partly because of the com

petition they face from party substitutes rather than because of their own structurally induced incapacity to make inroads into an institutionally open political space. These

different interpretations can be operationalized in a testable manner. If the "intrinsic

weakness" theory is right, no correlation would be found between the overall perfor mance of party nominees and that of gubernatorial political machine and politicized financial-industrial group candidates. To say that the major parties were failing purely due to such qualities as poor organizational capacity, a lack of resources, the absence

of meaningful reputation, or institutional incentives is to say that the share of the vote

that major parties "earned" collectively for their candidates through nomination in an

average district was not constrained in any way by that part of the vote earned collec

tively by the party substitutes studied here. Indeed, all of the variables noted above

(including parties and party substitutes, not to mention the controls) explained only 51 percent of the variation in district candidate vote totals, as indicated by the estimat

ed value of R2, at least suggesting that parties had room to expand independently of

party substitutes but failed to do so. If, in contrast, the supply and demand theory is

correct, a negative correlation would be found between the performance of important

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Henry E. Hale

party substitutes (as reflected in the share of ballots won by the candidates they

backed) and the vote totals of major party nominees. According to this interpretation,

many factors always go into voting decisions, including such intangibles as personali

ty and voter physical preferences; the 49 percent of the variation found to be

"unclaimed" by parties, governors, or politicized financial-industrial groups likely reflects such intangibles. Just because parties and party substitutes combined do not

explain 100 percent of the variation in voting, therefore, does not mean that they are

not in competition for that share of the vote that various political service providers

actually can hope to capture for their candidates.

To test these rival interpretations, the tobit statistical technique is employed. Tobit

makes use of the information that the cumulative vote percentage won by major par ties in each district (the dependent variable) is effectively "censored" at the value of

zero?that is, total party performance could not register as less than zero no matter

how bad the situation got for parties.50 The fact that in fourteen of the races consid

ered here major parties nominated no candidates and hence received zero votes

means that more accurate results are likely to be obtained by treating the data as cen

sored.51 Leaving other sources of cross-district variation in party performance for

future research, the testing here is limited to the narrow third hypothesis advanced in

this article. Is there a negative correlation between the performance of major party nominees and that of party substitute candidates? While the result will not be fully conclusive since district-level data are generally not available to detect all possible influences on voting for party candidates, it will be highly suggestive and an impor tant step beyond prior knowledge. The test was conducted in those 120 of the 224

districts where no major party nominee happened to be backed by a governor or a

politicized financial-industrial group. This test is the most appropriate one since the

argument is explicitly interested in the many districts where governors and party nominees were clearly in competition.52

Hypothesis 3: Results Table 2 reports the findings. As predicted by the supply and

demand theory, there is a strongly negative correlation between the vote totals of

candidates backed by governors and politicized financial-industrial groups and those

of the seven major parties' nominees in those 120 districts where governors did not

back major party nominees. The coefficients allow some idea of just how powerfully

governors and politicized financial-industrial groups can dampen party performance. When a governor's candidate won an extra one percent of a district's vote, the share

of this vote garnered by Russia's seven biggest parties is found to have dropped by about one-third of one percent. Politicized financial-industrial groups appear to

"crowd out" parties even more powerfully. For every one percent of the vote won by a politicized financial-industrial group candidate, Russia's major political parties are

found to lose over half of a percentage point of the district's ballots.

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Table 2 Correlates of District Totals of the Vote for Major Party Nominees

Governors, political machines: - 0.33***

PHGs: - 0.57***

Pseudo-R2 ?.U3

Number of observations 120 ***

P < -01

Conclusion

Parties may fail to penetrate a transitional polity not only when they are intrinsically weak, but also when they are strong but happen to face similarly strong competitors

(party substitutes) in the market for goods and services that help candidates get elected. This argument reconciles what otherwise appear to be strikingly contradicto

ry findings in the Russian case. Researchers who find that parties play a large role in

structuring voter choice and do so on the basis of ideology and social cleavages are

right. But those who report extremely thin party penetration of most state institutions

are also right. Russia's parties have failed to close out the electoral market not so

much because they are weak in and of themselves, but because they face heated

competition from party substitutes like governors' political machines and politicized financial-industrial groups that are in fact quite strong.

An important implication for comparative scholarship is that theories of institu

tions and broad social cleavages need to be supplemented with theories explaining variation in patterns of party substitutes. This variation will certainly depend on

electoral institutions, although it will also lead to the study of meso-level concentra

tions of power and resources (legacies of the dictatorial past and the transition itself) that are not broad enough to constitute social cleavages but that entrepreneurs might use to build party substitutes. Research into the formation of strong party systems in

new democracies should, therefore, more directly address how parties come to close

out the electoral market. This query is relevant not only to Russia, but to all coun

tries whose electoral systems permit independents to run. Indeed, independent candi

dates were a major part of political life in states as diverse as the U.S. of the 1820s

and India just after independence. The reasons why their position changed raise

some of the most important questions in explaining democratic development.53

Appendix: Statistical Method

The dependent variable for hypotheses 1 and 2 is a percentage. It is thus bounded

between zero and one hundred and can be interpreted as a composition, a particular

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Henry E. Hale

allocation of a district's total vote between one candidate and the others. Following

techniques developed and tested for analyzing compositional data, the dependent variable is transformed into a log ratio, the natural logarithm of a candidate's vote

total divided by the share of the vote not received by the candidate. Since log ratios are unbounded, they facilitate the method of ordinary least squares (OLS), which assumes no bounds.54 Since observations are not expected to be completely indepen dent within election districts but are expected to be independent across districts, the

Huber-White estimator of variance is used to obtain accurate estimates of statistical

confidence in the results and a control variable (Number) is also included indicating how many candidates were contesting a given district.55

While the actual coefficients (along with standard errors and p-values) are report ed in columns (b) of Table 1, it is helpful to use the software Clarify to obtain esti

mates of the average gain in the percentage of a given district's vote that an average candidate can expect to receive when his or her score on the listed factor changes from its minimum to its maximum value as well as the associated 95 percent confi

dence interval.56 Clarify works by using stochastic simulation to generate (in this

case) 1,000 estimates of the parameters, setting the independent variables at the

appropriate values, and then calculating the desired quantities from the 1,000 result

ing simulations. These results are reported in columns (a) of Table 1.

163

NOTES

The author would like to thank Naomi Wachs for research assistance, Robert Orttung for some important

data, Indiana University's Russian and East European Institute for funding through the Andrew M. Mellon

Foundation Endowment, and the many people who read and provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts in

various fora, including a workshop organized by the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security. 1. John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary Cox, Making

Votes Count (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (New York: Wiley, 1954); Herbert Kitschelt, "The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe," Politics

and Society, 20 (March 1992), 7-50; Herbert Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1999); Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and

Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967); Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and

Votes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 2. Israel M. Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurs hip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1973); Paul A. Samuelson, Economics, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). 3. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). 4. See Regina Smyth, "The Political Implications of Mixed Electoral Systems" (draft, 1998); Cox,

pp. 151-52.

5. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1976), pp. 58-64; E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 35-37.

6. Aldrich; Cox; Kitschelt et al.; and Smyth. 7. Samuelson, p. 59.




164

8. Aldrich; Cox; David M. Kreps, "Corporate Culture and Economic Theory," in James Alt and

Kenneth Shepsle, eds., Perspectives in Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990),

pp. 90-143; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1965); and Daniel S. Treisman, "Dollars and Democratization," Comparative Politics, 31 (October 1998), 1-22.

9. Smyth; Stephen E. Hanson, "Ideology, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Anti-System Parties in Post

Communist Russia," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 14 (March-June 1998), 98-127.

10. Kirzner, pp. 104-7; Samuelson, pp. 58, 409, 415-16.

11. Henry E. Hale, "Explaining Machine Politics in Russia's Regions," Post-Soviet Affairs, 19 (July

September 2003), 228-63; Kitschelt et al.; Herbert Kitschelt and Regina Smyth, "Programmatic Party Cohesion in Emerging Postcommunist Democracies," Comparative Political Studies, 35 (December

2002), 1228-56.

12. Operationally, what this study defines above as a "party" is formalized by the legal recognition of

the ministry of justice of the right of the organization to nominate candidates officially in Duma elections.

13. Michael McFaul, "The Perils of a Protracted Transition," Journal of Democracy, 10 (April 1999),

4-18; Peter Reddaway, "Instability and Fragmentation," Journal of Democracy, 5 (April 1994), 13-19;

Richard Rose, "Mobilizing Demobilized Voters in Post-Communist Society," Party Politics, 1 (January

1995), 549-63; Richard Rose, "A Supply Side View of Russia's Elections," East European Constitutional

Review, 9 (Winter-Spring 2000), 53-59, reprinted in Archie Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Rutland, "Has Democracy Failed in Russia," The

National Interest, 38 (December 1994), 3-12; Darrell Slider, "Russia's Governors and Party Formation,"

in Brown, ed., pp. 224-34; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, "Central Weakness and Provincial Autonomy," Post

Soviet Affairs, 15 (January-March 1999), 97-99; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, "The Limited Reach of Russia's

Party System," Politics and Society, 29 (September 2001). 14. Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, Vybory Glav Ispolnitel'noi Vlasti

Sub"ektov Rossiiskoi Federatsii 1995-97 (Moscow: Ves' Mir, 1997); Vybory v Organy Gosudarstvennoi

Vlasti Sub"ektov Rossiiskoi Federatsii 1997-2000, vols. 1, 2 (Moscow: Ves' Mir, 2001). 15. Kitschelt et al.; Kitschelt and Smyth; Rose, "A Supply Side View"; Richard Rose and Neil Munro,

Elections without Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 16. Jerry F. Hough, "The Failure of Party Formation and the Future of Russian Democracy," in

Timothy J. Colton and Hough, eds., Growing Pains (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1998),

pp. 685-88; Michael McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.

315; Richard Sakwa, "The Development of the Russian Party System," in Peter Lentini, ed., Elections and

Political Order in Russia (New York: Central European University Press, 1995), p. 184.

17. Hough, "The Failure of Party Formation and the Future of Russian Democracy," pp. 688, 696;

McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution, p. 316; Sakwa, pp. 191-92.

18. Hough, "The Failure of Party Formation and the Future of Russian Democracy," p. 691; John T

Ishiyama, "Political Integration and Political Parties in Post-Soviet Russian Politics," Demokratizatsiya, 1

(Spring 1999), 200; Sakwa, p. 169; Smyth. 19. Ishiyama, p. 200.

20. Sakwa, p. 190.

21. Slider; Stoner-Weiss, "The Limited Reach of Russia's Party System." 22. Kelly M. McMann, "The Personal Risks of Party Development," in Joel C. Moses, ed., Dilemmas

of Transition in Post-Soviet Countries (Chicago: Burnham Publishers, 2002). 23. Hough, "The Failure of Party Formation and the Future of Russian Democracy," pp. 699-700;

McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution, pp. 315-17.

24. McFaul, Russia s Unfinished Revolution, pp. 317-19.

25. Aldrich; Cox; Duverger; Lipset and Rokkan; Taagepera and Shugart.



Henry E. Hale

165

26. Ted Brader and Joshua A. Tucker, "The Emergence of Mass Partisanship in Russia, 1993-1996,"

American Journal of Political Science, 45 (January 2001); Thomas F Klobucar and Arthur H. Miller,

"Party Activists and Party Development in Post Soviet Democracies," paper presented at the annual meet

ing of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 28-September 1, 2002; Stephen White,

Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham: Chatham House, 1997). 27. Miller et al.; White, Rose, and McAllister.

28. Stephen Whitefield and Geoffrey Evans, "Class, Markets and Partisanship in Post-Soviet Russia:

1993-96," Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), 155-78; Whitefield, "Partisan and Party Divisions in Post

Communist Russia," in Brown, ed., pp. 235-43.

29. Brader and Tucker; Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2000), pp. 112-15; Arthur H. Miller et al., "Emerging Party Systems in Post-Soviet

Societies," Journal of Politics, 62 (May 2000), 455-90; Arthur H. Miller and Thomas F Klobucar, "The

Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies," American Journal of Political Science, 44

(October 2000). 30. Colton.

31. Klobucar and Miller.

32. Thomas F. Remington, "Political Conflict and Institutional Design," Journal of Communist Studies

and Transition Politics, 14 (March-June 1998), 201-23; Steven S. Smith and Thomas Remington, The

Politics of Institutional Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 33. On these elections, see Yitzhak Brudny, "Continuity or Change in Russian Electoral Patterns?," in

Brown, ed., pp. 154-78.

34. Colton; Miller et al; Miller and Klobucar; Brader and Tucker.

35. Robert Moser, "Independents and Party Formation," Comparative Politics, 31 (1999), 148.

36. Not all regional leaders have this formal title, but it is used here for convenience. Hale,

"Explaining Machine Politics in Russia's Regions"; Steven L. Solnick, "Russia's 'Transition,'" Social

Research, 66 (Fall 1999), 789-824; Stoner-Weiss, "Central Weakness and Provincial Autonomy"; Daniel

Treisman, After the Deluge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 37. Henry E. Hale, "Machine Politics and Institutionalized Electorates," Journal of Communist Studies

and Transition Politics, 15 (December 1999), 70-110; Henry E. Hale, "Bashkortostan," in Colton and

Hough, eds.; and Stoner-Weiss, "The Limited Reach of Russia's Party System." 38. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1968); Seymour Martin Lipset, "The Indispensability of Political Parties," Journal of Democracy, 11

(January 2000), 48-55; Mair.

39. Observers were given only the general instruction, not specific criteria by which to make their

assessments.

40. Radio Svoboda transcripts can be obtained at http://www.svoboda.org/archive/elections99. 41. Cases for which all three sources gave no indication were coded as "governor supports no one."

Cases where only one source covered the district and where that source gave only an indication (not a

definitive statement) of a gubernatorial endorsement were coded as gubernatorial support. A regression

applying stricter coding criteria (dropping the kinds of cases mentioned in this note) obtained essentially the same findings as those reported here.

42. The eighty-ninth region, Chechnya, and its district (the 225th) are excluded.

43. Colton and Hough; Juliet Johnson, A Fistful of Rubles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000);

Treisman, "Dollars and Democratization."

44. These sources were supplemented by reports in The Moscow Times, Dec. 21, 1999, ISI Emerging

Markets; Nezavisimaia Gazeta, Oct. 19, 1999, ISI Emerging Markets; and anonymous regional analysts in

personal communication with the author.

45. In the author's judgment. A separate category for business representatives was included as a control.

46. If there is any bias resulting from this coding process, it is likely to be in the direction of underesti




166

mating the impact of politicized financial-industrial groups. There are three likely reasons for overlooking a politicized financial-industrial group candidate. The politicized financial-industrial group was very effective in keeping its secret; support was not large; and the district is remote. Candidates of the first

type can be expected to be more effective than average since the reason for secrecy is that public suspi cion of corruption is seen to be a negative. Instances of the second type do not affect the argument since it

concentrates theoretically on cases of major support. As for the third, anecdotal evidence suggests that

politicized financial-industrial groups operating in remote areas are more effective than elsewhere

because there is less local money to put up resistance and because, if they do identify themselves, they can credibly promise to increase the region's wealth.

47. Nineteen of the 2,226 candidates are dropped in this study because some values are missing. 48. On the importance of personal candidate resources, see Smyth and Moser.

49. PFIG is the abbreviation for politicized financial-industrial group. 50. On tobit and why the coefficients it estimates can, with this particular kind of data, be read the

same way as OLS coefficients, see Lee Sigelman and Langche Zeng, Political Analysis, 8 (Spring 2000), 167-82.

51. These zero values also rule out the use of log ratios as done above.

52. Naturally, since governors' candidates are party nominees in the other 104 districts, the shares of

the vote for "governors' candidates" and for "party nominees" will vary together there. Only nineteen

governors consistently backed the same party in such instances, though. When joint candidate totals are

not counted as evidence of party strength but only of governors' strength, the correlation of course

remains strongly negative. The very important question why governors support party candidates in some

regions but not others is beyond the scope of this article but is treated by the author elsewhere. This article

is interested in what happens in the majority of cases, where governors do not back party candidates.

53. Aldrich; Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1966); Myron Weiner, Party-Building in a New Nation (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1967). 54. Jonathan N. Katz and Gary King, "A Statistical Model for Multiparty Electoral Data," American

Political Science Review, 93 (March 1999), 15-32; Michael Tomz, Joshua Tucker, and Jason Wittenberg, "An Easy and Accurate Regression Model for Multiparty Electoral Data," Political Analysis, 10 (Winter

2002), 66-83.

55. See the StataJ software manual, [U] 23.11, "obtaining robust variance estimates." The command

used is cluster (). The cost of this method is a small loss of efficiency, expected to be negligible in this

case given the large number of observations examined.

56. Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses," American Journal of Political Science, 44 (April 2000), 347-61; Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and

Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, Version 2.1, Stanford

University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University, 2001, available at http://gking.harvard.edu.



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