ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Russia profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. Russia’s elections were reasonably democratic in the 1990s, certainly the parliamentary elections were so, but democracy ended with the shift from President Boris Yeltsin to President Vladimir Putin. In the early 1990s Boris Yeltsin became Russian president and Russia began to more fully embrace democratic competition. There are a total of 450 members elected to the Russian State Duma. From 1993 to 2007 there was a parallel system in which 225 seats were elected by single-member plurality and the remaining 225 seats elected separately by party list proportional representation with a 5 percent national threshold. In the 1993 election, the main pro-government party was Russia’s democratic choice. It was the most successful political party in this election in terms of seats, though second in party list votes.
