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• Main Authors: Bryon J. Moraski, William M. Reisinger
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: THE DIFFUSION OF DEFERENCE; REGIONAL MACHINE STRENGTH; Northwest Russia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.476.8613; http://myweb.uiowa.edu/bhlai/workshop/reisinger.pdf

Federal elections in post-Soviet Russia provide an important opportunity to advance the literature on elections in authoritarian settings. Thanks to a period of democratic experimentation in a federal state, national elections in Russia are more closely tied to center-periphery politics than similar elections in contexts with unitary structures. Therefore, disaggregating federal election results over time, and at a meaningful level, yields valuable insights into the regime’s evolution. By tracing which regions were deferential to the Kremlin over time, we identify those that emerged as newly deferential in 2000. Combining this information with existing knowledge about the relationship between these regions and the Kremlin, we find that electoral deference spread over time across Russia’s regions through a process of learning. The analysis also reveals that the spatial diffusion of deference in Russia has boundaries: Regions in northwest Russia so far have resisted the drift toward deferential outcomes. Acknowledgements: The authors thank John O’Loughlin for sharing a shape file of Russia’s regions, Joe Aufmuth for his assistance in modifying the shape file, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova and Paul Voss for their suggestions, and Hyemin Joo for her research assistance. Bryon Moraski is particularly grateful to the