1
Studies of political regime types tend to separate the universe of potential cases into three
categories: consolidated, usually western, democracies; non-democracies; and democratizing
countries. Among the democratizing countries, the states of the post-Communist region provide
a plentiful source of information for scholars of democratic transitions. However, as observers
are beginning to realize, the transition process can cover an extended period of time. Indeed,
rather than looking at where these states come from or where they are heading, it seems
increasingly important to understand how they operate during this period of transition.
As elections are usually considered the starting point for classification as a democratic
state, they are widely investigated by scholars of both established and consolidating democracies.
Indeed, their regularity provides a continuously renewable source of data and questions. The
steadily increasing numbers of elections that have taken place in democratizing countries have
raised numerous questions about the development of democracy. A particularly important
question concerns how voters determine how they will vote once they are given this freedom.
Competitive political parties, which provide the primary cue to western voters as to which
candidates are worthy of their votes, are often still in the nascent stages of development,
particularly in the post-Communist countries. How then do voters gather the information they
need to decide how to place their votes?
To answer these questions, this paper turns to the case of the Russian Federation. Voters
have been faced with the task of selecting candidates for whom to cast their votes only a handful
of times. Voters require information about the choices in order to cast meaningful votes. To
some extent, voters can use party labels to evaluate candidates. However, it is still unclear to
what degree voters within Russia have begun to use political parties as a primary factor when
placing their votes. Moreover, party system development is not yet complete, and this is most
Convention