Electoral Behavior in the Russian Far East, 1995-2000: Contextual and Compositional Effects

Abstract

A group of political scientists specializing in Russia's post-Soviet electoral behavior explores the question of whether genuinely regional effects of voting behavior can be discerned (and at what scale) by controlling for variations in compositional characteristics measured by aggregate social and economic data. The paper seeks to identify situations in which contextual effects may be operating, using a scale of analysis that is intermediate between regional (oblast)-level case studies and nationwide surveys-that of the Russian Far East macroregion.