Functions of Authoritarian Elections: Testing the Theory (The Case of the 2014 Elections in St. Petersburg, Russia)

The conventional wisdom suggests that electoral manipulations are performed in order to win elections and legitimize authoritarian rulers. Waves of democratization and promotion of electoral models stimulated recent generation of autocrats to hold elections but manipulate them in a moderate way. Hence, some authors develop the strategic manipulation theory emphasizing study of electoral fraud which is used to secure electoral outcomes and avoid accusations from both international and domestic actors. An alternative explanation indicates that in authoritarian hybrid regimes elections serve informational purposes helping incumbents to estimate the mobilization potential of the opposition. Elections also help collecting information on the pro-incumbent actors, their loyalty and train them for future political careers. From this perspective, system of electoral manipulation functions as an instrument of political control that also yields indirect effects on the wide range of domestic actors through its informative role. Based on analysis of Russian politics, we assume that municipal elections attract lower interest of incumbents and voters, as well as from the international community. Hence, incumbents tend to invest less energy and resources in strategic electoral manipulation for the regime legitimation and information purposes, as compared to higher institutional levels of electoral politics. Holding constant the other conditions, we compare gubernatorial and municipal elections of 2014 in St. Petersburg, Russia in order to test assumptions of authoritarian elections theory. We start our investigation with the exploratory analysis of the electoral violations reported by citizens at the social networking site Vk.com and data collected by the movement of Electoral Observers in St. Petersburg. Next, through the means of the structural analysis and with the help of electoral forensics tools, we investigate the official electoral results of the municipal and gubernatorial elections and variations in the electoral outcomes.