The Electoral Cycle 2012-2016 and Party Systems in Russian Regions

The research is devoted to the assessment of the level of political competition in the party systems and representative bodies of the power of the regions of Russia. In the article, conditions of the formation of regional party systems in Russia in the 2000s are described, the political value of the party reform of 2012 is shown, and a chronological framework of the research is grounded. Conclusions of the article are based on the statistical data of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation about the results of the elections to the legislative assemblies of the territorial subjects of the Russian Federation which took place in 2012-2016. Such indicators as the number of parties participating in elections, the share of votes/seats of the winning party, and also the index of the effective number of parties (ENP) used in comparative political science calculated by G.V. Golosov's formula are applied to measure the level of competition between parties. This index is used in the article in two versions: (1) the effective number of electoral parties - for competition assessment in elections and (2) the effective number of parliamentary parties - for competition assessment in the elected legislative authority. Besides, to create a uniform scale, a new indicator - the average effective number of parties-is introduced. On its basis, the rating of regions of Russia on the competition level in the party systems is made. In the article, the conclusion is drawn that, with the tendency to unification, a variety of party systems in Russian regions is empirically observed. Regional party systems differ from each other in the number of offices of political parties, degree of their participation in elections, level of support of parties, and also the parliamentary group structure of legislative assemblies. United Russia's domination in regional elections in combination with the effect of a "fabricated majority" gave it hegemony as a part of the deputy corps even in the regions where the votes for this party were low. In general, the low level of competition in regional party systems is noted. However, the rating allows distinguishing two groups of regions in the regions of Russia. The first group is regions for which political competition is not characteristic at all. It is the Republic of Tuva, Kemerovo Oblast, the Chechen Republic, the Republic of Mordovia, Sevastopol. The second group of regions has a rather high level of political competition. It includes the Republic of Karelia, Altai Krai, Omsk and Kirov Oblasts, Primorsky Krai, and Novgorod Oblast.

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