A Manufactured Majority:
Vote–Seat Conversion in the 2003 Duma Elections
DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2005.01.09
Golosov G.V. A Manufactured Majority: Vote–Seat Conversion in the 2003 Duma Elections . – Polis. Political Studies. 2005. No. 1. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2005.01.09
The political success of the Unified Russia party in the 2003 Duma elections took place not so much in the electorate, for its list received a modest 37.6 per cent of the vote, but rather as a result of vote-seat conversion that allowed it to create a super-majority in the assembly. The article identifies several institutional and political mechanisms that made this result possible: a high level of party system fragmentation, with, at that, against all vote practiced, in the proportional tier of the electoral system; a lack of territorial bases of electoral support to opposition parties in the single-member tier of the electoral system; and latent coalition strategies in single-member districts, as a result of which many elected deputies were bound to join the Unified Russia faction.