ABSTRACT
Ranging from diminutive brochures to hardback books, Russian party platforms outline the strategies and policies of nascent party organizations. While some analysts scorn party platforms as little more than meaningless propaganda and others ignore party documents altogether, Russian party platforms can offer unique insight not only into individual parties, but also into the general structure of the political dialogue in a new democracy as well. This analysis employs a well-established party platform coding scheme, which has been used in more than 20 countries, to define and discuss policy spaces in Russian election campaigns. This project codes major party platforms from the 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections in Russia. The results of the coding can be used as an empirical test of many theories about party position-taking, the salience of certain issues in Russian elections, and the definition of the political spectrum among Russian parties. Perhaps even more importantly, the use of the coding scheme devised by Budge and his associates shows that Russian parties, to a great
extent, have quickly come to act in ways long familiar to observers of parties in more developed systems. The coding of party platforms is a primary step not simply in understanding Russian party strategy, but in studying Russian party behaviour in a cross-national context as well.
