Russian Political Parties: Dominance and Opposition

By Allison

Political party competition in Russia has been drastically restructured since the inception of the Putin administration in 2000. Early in his administration, President Putin changed the law on party representation in the Russian legislature from a threshold of 5% to 7%. Although President Putin argued that this change would assist oppositional political parties by encouraging consolidation and coalitions, it also served to eliminate a number of parties that had previously been represented in the Russian legislature, the Duma.

Formally, the party structure in Russia is characterized as a one-party dominant system, i.e. one political party largely controls the political landscape across numerous consecutive administrations. United Russia, the dominant party which was created by former President Putin, captured around 50% of the Duma vote in 2003 and around 66% in 2007. Because United Russia is considered a non-ideological political party, these electoral results may be somewhat surprising to Western observers, who interact with political parties that are based primarily on ideological strategies to win office. Unlike many opposition parties in Russia, such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, United Russia’s leaders claim to be “above politics” and do not need a strong ideological platform to secure office. Arguably, however, United Russia does not need an ideological platform because the party has an extremely large resource advantage compared to other parties, which enables it to promote the party message and attract voters more easily. This resource advantage encompasses a variety of tools: from television time and newspaper coverage, to office space and supplies for contacting voters by phone or mail.

The prospects for oppositional parties in a one-party dominant political systems are typically bleak, however dominant parties do lose power for a variety of reasons, e.g. the LDP in Japan or the PRI in Mexico. Although frequently politically constrained through authoritarian repression, oppositional parties in dominant party systems have a variety of options that they can pursue to gain political office. With regards to spatial voting, for example, they can try to capture the political space already colonized by the dominant party, which is frequently the center of the political spectrum, or define their own ideological space. For example, the Communist Party in Russia has retained the ideological platform from the Soviet era on the far left of the political spectrum, and attempts to compete with United Russia based on ideological grounds, rather than try to attract voters using administrative resources. Especially in the context of an underperforming economy, voters may favor concrete patronage goods distributed by United Russia than the ideological platforms promoted by oppositional parties. Thus, eligible voters frequently instrumentalize the act of voting: a citizen views voting for the dominant party as a fair exchange for a job or other economic good that they need. Although it is uncertain whether United Russia will survive in a post-Putin era, the instrumentalization of voting in combination with United Russia’s current resource advantages, make drastic change in the party structure and political representation in Russia rather unlikely.