Dense Networks, Ethnic Minorities, and Electoral Mobilization in Contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

Dense networks are supposed to allow political machines to solve the “commitment problem” that is typical for electoral mobilization. Highlighting the effect of dense networks, we study the features of local communities that facilitate their emergence: countryside, small size of a settlement, and “segregated” type of ethnic groups’ localization in relation to each other. On the ground of the 2016 Duma elections, an original dataset based on local-level data and GIS techniques, we examine these attributes of local units in the combination with ethnic structure, and find moderator-type effects that indirectly prove the importance of dense networks in electoral mobilization.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Stokes et al. also make a distinction between noncontingent individual exchanges and noncontingent pork-barrel politics when the program targets collectivities, such as geographic constituencies (Stokes et al. 2013, 12).

2. As Hicken and Nathan (2020, 280) note, the term clientelism is frequently used by many scholars in a broader sense and includes different kinds of deviations from the narrow sense but in this article, we follow the narrower definition.

3. According to the literature, the activity of political machines is frequently limited to distribution of material benefits or clientelist exchanges (Stokes et al. 2013, 13; Golosov 2013, 459). In this article, we hold the view that conceptually, political machines are not in line with the sub-types of nonprogrammatic electoral mobilization.

4. We treat only urban and municipal districts as “upper tier” municipalities. Municipal districts (but not urban districts) are divided into nearly 20,000 small “lower tier” municipalities (urban settlements and rural settlements). Moscow and St Petersburg are not included in the analysis as they have a special structure of local government. Crimea and Sevastopol are excluded due to the very specific political situation in these regions after their accession to Russia.

5. In addition, some observations are excluded for reasons related to the research design that is described below. Specifically, in order to make our hierarchical analysis converging, we cannot include six regions with fewer than 10 municipalities. Also, we exclude as outliers 12 urban districts where large size of settlement is combined with segregated minority localization.

6. Certainly, one more combination (ethnic minorities at least partly segregated from each other and Russians in big cities) is possible; however, we found only 12 observations corresponded to this category. This is so incomparable with the number of observations in the other two categories that they needed to be considered a residual category and excluded from the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research as part of the research project No. 19-011-00257 А.