Coordinated Voting Against the Autocracy: The Case of the ‘Smart Vote’ Strategy in Russia

Abstract

Is coordinated anti-regime voting by opposition-minded citizens possible in authoritarian settings where the opposition does not coalesce against the regime? If so, what are the factors behind the citizens’ (un)willingness to vote strategically for the opposition? This study investigates the ‘smart vote’ (umnoe golosovanie) strategy of Aleksei Naval’nyi in the 2020 subnational elections in Russia and shows that it boosted non-regime candidates’ electoral results countrywide. The article also finds that the willingness of anti-regime voters to behave strategically depends on the candidates’ opposition credentials, and that this willingness can be affected by the scope of voter intimidation available to the authorities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, ‘Kak my budem pobezhdat’ “Edinuyu Rossiyu” na vyborakh. Umnoe golosovanie’, Navalny.com, 28 November 2018, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6017/, accessed 9 August 2021.

2 For an application of this argument to Russia, see Wilson (2016).

3 Of course, electoral authoritarianism does not exclude the possibility of sincere expressive or instrumental voting for the government or for the regime-controlled opposition (Frye et al. 2017). However, much of the reasoning about strategic voting is irrelevant to autocracies simply because there is no party of first preference for those voters who reject the regime in its entirety.

4 A specific form of insincere voting that can be observed in democracies is the so-called ‘protest voting’ when votes are cast for ideologically extreme or otherwise unacceptable parties, irrespective of their viability or coalition potential, in order to punish the parties of first preference for their perceived policy pitfalls (Alvarez et al. 2018).

5 See, the websites of the Central Election Commission of Russia (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom and http://cikrf.ru, accessed 25 April 2021.

6 In 2012 through 2019, Naval’nyi attempted to obtain official registration for his party under the names of People’s Alliance (Narodnyi Al’yans, 2012), Party of Progress (Partiya Progressa, 2014), and Russia of the Future (Rossiya Budushchego, 2018). None of these attempts was successful.

7 For a systematic exposition of the strategy by one of its key ideologists and organisers, see ‘Leonid Volkov ob “umnom golosovanii”’, Novaya gazeta, 3 December 2018, available at: https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/173927, accessed 9 August 2021.

8 See, ‘Kak my budem pobezhdat’ “Edinuyu Rossiyu” na vyborakh. Umnoe golosovanie’, Navalny.com, 28 November 2018, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6017/, accessed 9 August 2021.

9 See, ‘V Peterburge—rekordno nizkaya yavka na vyborakh. Chitateli “Bumagi” rasskazyvayut, pochemu vse zhe poshli golosovat’’, Bumaga, 9 September 2019, available at: http://paperpaper.ru/v-peterburge-rekordno-nizkaya-yavka-n/, accessed 25 March 2021.

10 See, ‘Obrashchenie v “den’ tishiny”’, Navalny.com, 7 September 2019, available at: http://navalny.com/p/6227/, accessed 25 March 2021.

11 One of these cities, Sterlitamak, had to be excluded from this study because there was no smart vote campaign there.

12 The list of the included elections is presented in Table A1 in the online Appendix.

13 ‘Itogi obshchestvennogo nablyudeniya za vyborami v edinyi den’ golosovaniya 13 sentyabrya 2020 goda’, Golosinfo.org, 15 October 2020, available at: https://www.golosinfo.org/articles/144816#2-2, accessed 17 July 2021.

14 ‘Pobeda!’, Navalny.com, 9 September 2019, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6228/, accessed 9 August 2021.

15 Mean vote shares were taken for those repeat runners who ran in more than one election in 2015–2019.

16 It is important to mention that the smart vote effect was stronger in the subsamples of regional capitals and other cities than in the subsample of regional legislative elections that comprised both urban and rural electoral districts, and where more than three-quarters of all non-UR candidates (see Table A2 in the online Appendix) were affiliated with major official opposition parties.

17 Single-member plurality systems were in use in all but two localities. Controlling for multimember electoral districts by a dummy variable did not change the output presented in Table 3 (results are not shown, available on request from the authors).

18 No such instances were registered in regional legislative elections, which explains the absence of this variable in the related model. For multimember plurality districts, the variable was defined as the absolute share of seats contested by United Russia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mikhail Turchenko

Mikhail Turchenko, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, European University at St Petersburg, 6/1A Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation. Email: [email protected]

Grigorii V. Golosov

Grigorii V. Golosov, Professor, Head of Political Science Department, European University at St Petersburg, 6/1A Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation. Email: [email protected]