Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Electoral reforms and democratization 121For President Putin’s administration electoral reforms in the Russianregions were just as integral an element in the construction of the ‘vertical ofpower’ as the reforms that preceded them: reform of the power structures(reforms that removed the power structures from the control of the regionalgovernment bodies and made them totally subordinate to the president andthe leaders that he appointed) and of the allocation of economic powersbetween the centre and the regions (the cancellation of the principle of ‘twokeys’ in the matter of the exploitation of natural resources, etc.).In addition, those who advocated standardization of regional electorallegislation cited clear ‘deviations’ in the electoral legislation of such regionsas Kalmykiya, Tyva, Ingushetiya and others, to prove how essential it was.In the framework of the new law on political parties, which made partiesincreasingly dependent on the state authorities, the party vertical centred onMoscow, no less than the executive vertical, was to be set to work ‘reinforcingthe country’s unity’ and strengthening internal cohesion.The ruling elite gradually learnt how to engage with a new area of publiclife, political parties, and the federal bureaucracy mastered the techniques ofelectoral engineering, thereby creating a model consisting of an increasinglymanaged party system and limited political competition.On the one hand, the multi-party system had become an integral part ofthe country’s political system after the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Inparticular, Article 13 of the Russian Constitution enshrines the acceptance ofpolitical variety, a plurality of parties. At the same time the generallyaccepted principles and rules of international law and the status of internationaltreaties signed by the Russian Federation (Part 4 of Article 15 of theConstitution) are a component of the national legal system. The rulesenshrining the multi-party system are contained in the Declaration onCriteria for Free and Fair Elections adopted in Paris in 1994, the UniversalDeclaration on Democracy adopted in 1997, and also in documents signedby the Russian Federation and adopted by the Conference on Security andCooperation in Europe, 1 which took place in three stages: in Paris in 1989,Copenhagen in 1990 and Moscow in 1991. Thus the existence of a multipartysystem forms part of the international obligations that they took on.On the other hand, the state bureaucracy’s apparently instinctive inclinationtowards complete control over public life, part of the Soviet institutional legacy,drove it to search for levers by which the new political system could be directedand this led to its discovery and ‘seizure’ of those rules from various electoralmodels that offered the potential for manipulating the electoral process whilstmaintaining the external aspect of a multi-party and competitive system.The result is a system of limited party competition, in which parties areplaced under actual state control and citizens have almost no ability to unitefreely in political parties. This is the result of an attempt to assure the formalexistence of a multi-party system but to use various manipulatory mechanismsto subvert the meaning that such a system traditionally has in developeddemocracies.