2
apparent with respect to the Duma district races. Many candidates, including both Yeltsin and
Putin, have run as independents, which hinders voters from giving their votes to a candidate
based on an ideological coherence between the candidate and voter. In the absence of strong
party cues, voters often turn to national and regional leaders for information on how they should
vote. Certainly, former President Yeltsin’s endorsement of Vladimir Putin played a crucial role
in Putin’s victorious presidential run. This phenomenon is quite prevalent at the subnational
level as well. In regions governed by popular and powerful executives, voters could easily be
swayed by the regional head’s endorsement of a particular candidate. For this paper, I
hypothesize that the underdeveloped nature of the party system has led to regional executive
endorsement as the key factor in how voters select among candidates. The quality of the
candidates involved is most likely also a key piece of information taken into account by voters
and will be considered in this model as well. These hypotheses will then be tested with
quantitative analysis from the 1999 Duma single-member district elections.
Political Parties and the Mixed-Member Duma
Based on a 1993 presidential decree that was largely incorporated into law in 1995,
Russia adopted a mixed member system for electing representatives to the lower house of the
legislature. Exactly half of the Duma’s 450 members are elected by party lists in a single nation-
wide district using a proportional representation (PR) system. A five-percent threshold is used to
determine which parties will sit in parliament. The other half of the Duma is selected by
plurality races in single-member districts (SMD’s). The districts are apportioned based on
population, although there is some variation due to each of Russia’s eighty-nine federal regions
Convention