Assessing Electoral Preferences of United Russia Voters

This paper examines factors influencing the electoral preferences of the United Russia voters. Based on the survey data collected by the Levada analytical center in August 2021, this paper answers the question: Why do Russian citizens vote for the ruling party and what can challenge their electoral preferences? For this purpose, a nationwide survey was conducted one month before the 2021 federal parliamentary elections. The list of questions included 15 demographic questions and 12 questions about voting preferences. Based on the results, two hypotheses were tested. First, it was tested whether the provision of public goods by political parties is a similarly important factor for both core and swing voters of United Russia. Second, we tested the hypothesis that private goods are primarily targeted to core supporters of the ruling party. The results of the logit and probit regression analysis support the two main hypotheses of this research. First, there is a clear relationship between private goods and the probability of becoming a core United Russia voter. In the survey, this was measured by private connections - whether a person considers his or her personal connections to party representatives to be an important factor in the voting decision. In line with what Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros, and Estévez (2016) described, core voters are included in the redistribution of private benefits, while public goods go to both types of voters. This is partly proven by the results of the analysis - we do not see any significant influence of public goods on the probability of being a United Russia voter, neither core nor swing. In addition, it was found that inducement from United Russia negatively affects the probability of being a UR voter. At the same time, inducement from regional or local administration positively affects voting for UR. In the recent study by Shkel (2020), it is found that the main driving mechanism of the effectiveness of a political machine is local elites, as their personal ties with voters provide a reliable guarantee that they will vote for the ruling party. Thus, we can clearly observe patronage practices from the analysis. This means that, contrary to popular belief, authoritarian regimes do not simply "draw" the desired electoral results. They actually target specific groups of voters and offer them special benefits in exchange for their electoral support. Moreover, being part of the ruling party's core constituency is associated with access to these benefits. This is evidenced not only by the respondents' assessment of the importance of their personal ties for their electoral choice, but also by the significant effect of inducements from regional and local authorities on the probability of being a core voter. On the contrary, when it comes to public goods, we do not observe any significant influence of corresponding variables on the type of United Russia voters.