Political parties and their competitors : party development in Russia's regions

The variation in expansion of national political parties into regional politics in Russia poses a fundamental challenge to theories of party development by presenting an empirical puzzle: why have national politics dominated in some regions yet failed to elect or even present candidates in others? Conventional explanations for party weakness in Russia invoke cultural constraints or poor institutional incentives but neither provide sufficient variation to explain these outcomes at the regional level. These failures correspond to a larger lacunae in the party literature on the process by parties become nationalized and eliminate their regional competitors.This study addresses these empirical questions by re-examining regional elites and their ability to create informal alternatives to parties. I argue that the failure of national political party development in Russian regional politics is not simply the product of poor institutional incentives but rather due to the active opposition of regional elites. Where regional elites successfully mobilized the resources made available during transition, they prevented the entry of national parties by furnishing their own candidates with powerful financial resources and lending them reputation that resonated with the electorate. These outcomes were not predetermined by legacies of the Soviet era, however, but were rather contingent on the ability of regional executives to rapidly construct winning coalitions, particularly through the mobilization of administrative resources and the construction of patronage networks. Hence, the successful development national parties in regional politics was as much a story of weak regional regimes as it was a story of successful regional party branches