Koenig, Christoph (2015) Competence vs. loyalty : political survival and electoral fraud in Russia’s regions 2000–2012. Working Paper. Coventry: University of Warwick. Department of Economics. Warwick economics research papers series (WERPS) (1080). (Unpublished)

Preview

PDF WRAP_twerp_1080_koenig.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (9Mb) | Preview

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

Election fraud is a pervasive feature of autocracies but often only serves lower-tier
officials to cast signals of loyalty or competence to the central government in order
to pursue their own interests. How much such personal interests matter for electoral
fraud under autocracy has however not been studied so far. In this paper, I exploit
a radical policy change in Russia which allowed the president to replace governors of
the country’s 89 regions at his own will. As a result, federal elections after December
2004 were organised by two types of governors: one was handpicked by the president, the other one elected before the law change and re-appointed. Even though both types faced removal in case of bad results, the need to signal loyalty was much lower for the first type. In order to estimate the e.ect of handpicked governors on electoral fraud, I use a diff-in-diff framework over 7 federal elections between 2000 and 2012. For this time period, I use results from about 95,000 voting stations to construct a new indicator of suspicious votes for each region and election. I show that this indicator correlates strongly with incidents of reported fraud. My baseline estimates show that in territories with a handpicked governor the share of suspicious votes decreased on average by more than 10 percentage points and dropped even further if the region’s economy had done well over the past legislature. These findings suggest that governors have less need to use rigging as a signal once loyalty is assured unless faced with circumstances raising doubts about their competence.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Political culture -- Russia (Federation), Elections -- Corrupt practices -- Russia (Federation), Discourse analysis -- Political aspects -- Russia (Federation), Russia (Federation) -- Politics and government -- 2000-2012
Series Name:	Warwick economics research papers series (WERPS)
Publisher:	University of Warwick. Department of Economics
Place of Publication:	Coventry
ISSN:	0083-7350
Official Date:	November 2015
Dates:	Date Event November 2015 Published
Number:	1080
Number of Pages:	37
Institution:	University of Warwick
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Date of first compliant deposit:	27 January 2016

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads