the formation of a party-system than adds to it, because they have no hope of winning,
except in very rare cases where the leader of the party, who might be famous, is an SMD
nominee. But in these cases his candidacy is more like that of an independent, since he
brings far more to the party than it does to him. For some regions, I have also been able
to collect data on regional duma elections, though this is quite hard to come by (see
Golosov, 2003), except for elections since December, 2003. This regional duma electoral
data is quite interesting. However, data that pre-dates the application of the new version
of the law “On the Main Guarantees of Electoral Rights and Rights to Participate in a
Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation,” in July 2003, party affiliation is
drastically low, reflecting the desire of candidates to be responsible for their own
nomination, instead of beholden to a party. This seems to have reversed with the advent
of the new law, as well as the eagerness of many regional legislators to jump on the
United Russia bandwagon. Finally, I counted as partisan those candidates that were not
party-nominated, but listed a party-affiliation on the ballot paper. While the party
organizations cannot control this, my interest in how party labels resonate with the voters
counteracts worries that “unauthorized” candidates might be running. Now, before we
examine the data, explain my concept of parties structuring electoral outcomes.
Do Parties Structure Electoral Outcomes?
What does it mean to say that parties structure electoral outcomes? It may mean
several things. It could mean that political parties win all the seats up for election in a
given election, “closing out the market,” in the words of Henry Hale (2000: 21), to
independents or candidates backed by non-party organizations. This is a rather extreme
form of structuring political outcomes, however, and may have important exceptions that
Convention