ABSTRACT
Among post-communist countries, Russia demonstrates a rather mixed record of party system development after more than fifteen years since the emergence of competitive electoral politics. Various studies attest to Russia’s party system in the 1990s as under-developed, unstable, volatile and highly fragmented without a strong party presence on the ground, especially in regional and local politics.1 In the 2000s, Russia’s party system experienced a pendulum-like swing toward a seemingly successful attempt at building a dominant “party of power” which resulted in the decline of party competition.2 The democratic quality of elections in Russia is widely questioned, especially in the wake of Organization on Security and Co-operation reports on the 2003 and the 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections which were evaluated as “free but unfair.”3 The focus of this criticism is the nature of electoral competition in Russia, including the systematic encroachment of the state apparatus into electoral politics, the biased coverage of elections in the media, the selective implementation of electoral laws by electoral commissions and
courts and unequal assess to political finance (including the abuse of public finances for campaign purposes).4
