Europe-Asia Studies
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Coordinated Voting Against the Autocracy: The
Case of the ‘Smart Vote’ Strategy in Russia
Mikhail Turchenko & Grigorii V. Golosov
To cite this article: Mikhail Turchenko & Grigorii V. Golosov (2023) Coordinated Voting Against
the Autocracy: The Case of the ‘Smart Vote’ Strategy in Russia, Europe-Asia Studies, 75:5,
820-841, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2022.2147485
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2147485
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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2023
Vol. 75, No. 5, June 2023, 820–841
Coordinated Voting Against the Autocracy:
The Case of the ‘Smart Vote’ Strategy in
Russia
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
Abstract
Is coordinated anti-regime voting by opposition-minded citizens possible in authoritarian settings where the
opposition does not coalesce against the regime? If so, what are the factors behind the citizens’
(un)willingness to vote strategically for the opposition? This study investigates the ‘smart vote’ (umnoe
golosovanie) strategy of Aleksei Naval’nyi in the 2020 subnational elections in Russia and shows that it
boosted non-regime candidates’ electoral results countrywide. The article also finds that the willingness of
anti-regime voters to behave strategically depends on the candidates’ opposition credentials, and that this
willingness can be affected by the scope of voter intimidation available to the authorities.
IN ORDER TO CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITARIAN STATUS QUO effectively, those opposing
it have to solve a number of collective action problems (Tucker 2007; Schedler 2013). As
Gandhi observes, ‘opposition to the dictatorship may be widespread, but it does not pose
a threat to the regime unless it is organised’ (Gandhi 2008, p. 95). For this reason, the
formation of opposition alliances is often considered an important step towards
liberalising electoral outcomes (Howard & Roessler 2006). However, this step may be
difficult when genuine critics of the regime are not allowed to run in elections, so that the
electoral arena is open only to those actors who have been co-opted (Albrecht 2005;
Schedler 2013). Does the exclusion of some opposition forces, and the co-optation of
others, prevent opposition-minded voters from meaningful collective action in
authoritarian elections? If it does not, what are the factors behind the citizens’ willingness
to vote collectively for opposition candidates or to abstain from doing so? These are the
questions this study seeks to answer.
Prior research has shown that pre-electoral opposition coalitions may catalyse regime
change in autocracies (Howard & Roessler 2006; Bunce & Wolchik 2010; Donno 2013;
Wahman 2013). Another branch of the literature sheds a light on conditions calling antiincumbent coalitions into existence (Wahman 2011; Beissinger 2013; Gandhi & Reuter
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2147485.
Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
© 2022 University of Glasgow
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2147485
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
821
2013) and enabling them to pose credible threats to non-democratic rule (Ufen 2020; Ong
2022). Much less is known, however, about the micro-level dynamics between a coalition
of opposition parties and their support base of opposition-minded voters (Gandhi & Ong
2019). In part, this lack of scholarly attention can be connected to the fact that, until
recently, electoral autocracies have not faced coordination attempts by the opposition
other than in the form of pre-electoral coalitions, calls for election boycotts or electionrelated street protests (Hafner-Burton et al. 2018). At the same time, with the spread of
social media, which facilitate micro-level political coordination, collective anti-regime
action at the individual level can be organised in autocracies more efficiently than ever in
the past (Zhuravskaya et al. 2020), especially when citizens are called upon not to
participate in street protests but rather in legitimate and relatively safe activities such as
voting. This study expands the literature on electoral coordination in authoritarian
regimes by moving the focus from studying coalitions of opposition parties to attempts to
coordinate opposition-minded voters. By switching attention from the elite level to the
individual-level dynamics of the authoritarian electoral game, this study contributes to the
emerging literature on citizens’ responses to collective anti-regime electoral enterprises
(Gandhi & Ong 2019) and electoral behaviour in autocracies (Letsa 2020).
This article investigates anti-regime voter coordination by studying the smart vote
(umnoe golosovanie) campaign launched by the Russian opposition politician Aleksei
Naval’nyi in November 2018 and implemented in the 2019 and 2020 subnational
elections. The key element of the campaign was an application enabling oppositionminded citizens to synchronise their voting against the main pro-regime party, United
Russia (Edinaya Rossiya—UR), in single- or multi-member plurality electoral districts.
The smart vote campaign provided opposition voters with advice on which opposition
candidate to vote for in order to prevent the election of the UR candidate in the given
district. Accordingly, the organisers of the smart vote campaign claimed that they selected
those opposition candidates who enjoyed the highest levels of support at the district
level,1 even though the exact criteria for selection were never explained in full. A recent
study by Turchenko and Golosov (2021) demonstrated that, in the 2019 municipal
elections in St Petersburg, Naval’nyi’s strategy was to encourage opposition-minded
voters to support the candidates backed by the smart vote campaign, thus reducing the
UR vote.
This study expands from prior research in two ways. First, it investigates the nationwide
effects of the smart vote campaign on a sample of 44 elections held in 2020 at different levels
of Russia’s administrative structure. Second, the theoretical basis of the empirical analysis
allows our findings on Russia to be placed in the wider cross-national context of ongoing
research on authoritarian politics and electoral behaviour.
Technically, Naval’nyi’s campaign resembled the vote advice applications (VAAs) that
are increasingly significant in well-established democracies (Garzia & Marschall 2016;
van der Linden & Vowles 2017). The literature on VAAs shows that these electronic tools
have an impact on voter behaviour. VAAs can boost turnout (Alvarez et al. 2014),
1
See, ‘Kak my budem pobezhdat’ “Edinuyu Rossiyu” na vyborakh. Umnoe golosovanie’, Navalny.com,
28 November 2018, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6017/, accessed 9 August 2021.
822
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
especially amongst younger voters (Marschall & Schultze 2015), improve citizens’ political
knowledge (Kamoen et al. 2015) and affect the political choices of undecided voters
(Kleinnijenhuis et al. 2019). In this study, we explore the impact of online tools on voting
behaviour under authoritarian rule, adding to the growing scholarship on the influence
exerted by the internet upon the politics of autocracies.
We posit that, even in authoritarian settings where opposition parties are excluded from
electoral participation, disunited and/or co-opted by the regime, it is possible for opposition
voters to coordinate against pro-regime agents across different electoral contexts. At the
same time, as indicated in the literature on voter responses to pre-electoral coalitions
(Gschwend & Hooghe 2008; Gandhi & Ong 2019), citizens may retract their support for
an opposition coalition if it includes their least preferred party. Thus, we expect that
opposition voters may have strong biases towards some of the permitted opposition
parties, which are considered pro-regime rather than genuinely oppositional. Finally, we
expect that the scope of collective voting is negatively related to the amount of
intimidation to which an opposition voter may be exposed. As Hafner-Burton et al. argue,
intimidation can ‘coerce would-be opposition voters into voting for the incumbent out of
fear of reprisal for supporting the opposition’ (Hafner-Burton et al. 2018, p. 465).
We test the above expectations by analysing district-level data on the general population
of candidates across the whole set of the 2020 subnational elections in which the smart vote
campaign was implemented, supplemented with information on repeat runners who
participated in the previous elections of 2015 and subsequent byelections in the same
districts or localities under the same party labels. We focus on district-level rather than
individual-level data. One of the reasons for this approach is quite straightforward: there
are no public opinion poll data on the conduct of the smart vote campaign, its public
perception or its efficacy. At the same time, our focus on district-level data offers several
advantages. First, district-level analysis is focused on the setting wherein voter
coordination actually occurs (Crisp et al. 2012). Therefore, we are able to assess the
output of voter coordination rather than mere intentions and to avoid specific survey
problems, such as social sensitivity bias or preference falsification. Second, the
comparison of repeat runners’ electoral results—some of whom enjoyed smart vote
support, while others did not—enables the effects of the smart vote to be estimated with a
high degree of confidence. Third, the district level of analysis allows us to take into
account the political and societal contexts in which voting takes place.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section presents a theoretical discussion of
opposition coordination and collective anti-regime voting under authoritarianism. After
that, we provide an overview of Russia’s electoral politics with a special emphasis on the
changing strategies pursued by Russia’s anti-regime opposition. We then describe the
data, specify our theoretical expectations, and develop testable hypotheses. Finally, we
perform a series of empirical tests using a variety of statistical techniques.
Opposition coordination and anti-regime voting under authoritarianism
Elections serve ambivalent goals under authoritarianism (Schedler 2013). On the one hand,
elections enable an authoritarian incumbent to sustain his grip on power (Brownlee 2007;
Greene 2007; Gandhi 2008; Wright & Escribà-Folch 2012). On the other, elections
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
823
provide the political opposition with a way to challenge the authoritarian status quo, which
may lead to liberalising political outcomes (Howard & Roessler 2006). The feasibility of
such outcomes depends on the opposition’s ability to both coalesce and mobilise its
supporters (Howard & Roessler 2006; Bunce & Wolchik 2010; Donno 2013; Wahman
2013).
Most literature on opposition coordination under authoritarianism focuses on political
parties. Wahman (2011) finds that opposition parties are more willing to unite when they
believe in the possibility of victory and when the policy gap between them and the
incumbent is deep. Gandhi and Reuter (2013) argue that opposition coalitions are more
likely to form in the presence of an influential and long-standing opposition party.
Beissinger (2013) shows that broad societal dissatisfaction with the incumbent regime
facilitates the formation of negative coalitions across diverse partisan groupings. Ufen
(2020), in his study of the 2018 Malaysian general election, identifies several factors that
led the coalition of opposition parties to victory, including the ability to run strong joint
candidates, ideological closeness and tight links with civil society groups. Ong (2022)
also highlights the importance of joint campaigns conducted by opposition alliances in
autocracies.
Since a united opposition may pose a credible threat to autocratic rule, it is in the interests
of a dictator to counteract any attempts by opposition parties to form coalitions. Some
authoritarian regimes are capable of preventing parties or candidates that can pose a
threat to the regime from entering the electoral arena (Golosov 2013). This strategy can
be implemented openly, by banning the activities of certain parties for political reasons
(Bogaards et al. 2010), or covertly, by introducing legislation with a plethora of detailed,
seemingly technical requirements for party or candidate registration that cannot be met by
opposition parties (Karvonen 2007). Some permitted parties may not have any significant
programmatic or policy disagreements with the incumbent authorities; this can be
characteristic of parties that are personal political vehicles (Lust-Okar 2008) or narrow
interest-based groups (Tordoff & Young 1999). Other parties have distinct programmatic
or policy stances that are not appealing to wide sectors of the electorate, attracting a small
but steady following instead, allowing for their characterisation as niche parties (Wagner
2011). It is sometimes argued that the autocrats’ willingness to tolerate such formations
contributes to the stability of authoritarian regimes (Albrecht 2005).2 To contain
opposition attempts to coordinate at the level of political parties, incumbents may also
co-opt key opposition figures and induce splits in the opposition camp (Schedler 2013, p. 91).
Yet even in overtly authoritarian contexts, opposition electoral coordination may be
highly consequential because a poor electoral performance by the leading pro-regime
party can undermine the regime’s image of popular support and its internal cohesion
(Smyth 2020, p. 25). Moreover, in such circumstances the regime may be forced to rely
on outright electoral fraud, which increases the risks of post-election protests (Tucker
2007; Magaloni 2010; Hafner-Burton et al. 2018).
Consider an authoritarian setting where multiparty competition is allowed and the set of
competitors is comprised of candidates from the pro-regime party, independents and the
2
For an application of this argument to Russia, see Wilson (2016).
824
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
candidates of moderate opposition parties that are subordinated to the regime and unable or
unwilling to join forces to challenge the status quo. It is theoretically important to
disentangle the reasons why anti-regime voters may wish to vote collectively for
candidates who are allowed to compete against the ruling party or to abstain from doing
so in such circumstances.
Purely anti-regime voters in an autocracy are so defined because they support neither the
overtly pro-regime parties nor those moderate parties that are perceived by these voters as
regime affiliates. Therefore, the behaviour of such voters, if not manifest in the form of
abstention, falls into the category of strategic voting. As defined in a scholarly tradition
launched by Duverger (1954) and featuring, amongst others, a seminal contribution by
Cox (1997), strategic voting is insincere instrumental voting.3 Typically, strategic voting
in democracies takes place when a voter is willing to vote for their second most preferred
party if the more preferred party is unlikely to win, particularly if there is a close contest
between the second- and third-ranked parties. As demonstrated by a mounting number of
studies reviewed in a recent volume published by Stephenson et al. (2018), strategic
voting takes many shapes, depending on the structure of the party system, electoral rules
and other country-specific factors. Irrespective of this diversity, the defining features of
strategic voting are that it does not express the true preferences of the elector, and that it
is used instrumentally by the voter to affect election outcomes.4 In a democracy, the
calculus of strategic voting can be expressed as follows: R = PB + D – C (Riker &
Ordeshook 1968, p. 28). In this model, R is the reward obtained by the voter, B is the
expected benefit from voting for the preferred candidate, D is the benefit from doing the
civic duty of voting, and C stands for the costs of voting. P is the probability that the
citizen will, by voting, get the benefit, B.
In an autocracy, instrumental benefits are not in the calculus of anti-regime strategic
voting. An alternative instrumental motivation, still available for anti-regime voters, is
inflicting harm on the regime. To explain this possible motivation, it is useful to review
the gains that the autocrat seeks to derive from successful performance at the polls. We
will concentrate on an institutional setting that is empirically most relevant to this study,
that of elections to multimember assemblies. Of course, the primary goal of incumbent
authorities, in autocracies as well as in democracies, is to retain power by winning a
majority of seats for the ruling party. In consolidated autocracies, autocrats are normally
able to achieve not only this goal but also to convince voters that they will not give up
power in any circumstances.
However, the scope of the ruling party’s electoral success also matters. Stable,
consolidated authoritarian regimes tend to win elections by a large margin. Indeed,
‘supermajoritarian election outcomes and high turnout generate an image of invincibility
3
Of course, electoral authoritarianism does not exclude the possibility of sincere expressive or
instrumental voting for the government or for the regime-controlled opposition (Frye et al. 2017).
However, much of the reasoning about strategic voting is irrelevant to autocracies simply because there is
no party of first preference for those voters who reject the regime in its entirety.
4
A specific form of insincere voting that can be observed in democracies is the so-called ‘protest voting’
when votes are cast for ideologically extreme or otherwise unacceptable parties, irrespective of their viability
or coalition potential, in order to punish the parties of first preference for their perceived policy pitfalls
(Alvarez et al. 2018).
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
825
that works to dissuade potential elite challenges, particularly those coming from powerful
party officials’ (Magaloni & Kricheli 2010, p. 128). Such election outcomes also project
an image of wholehearted majority support for the autocrat, which discourages opposition
activism at the grassroots level and hinders the organisational development of anti-regime
parties (Simpser 2013). Besides, the ruling party’s poor performance at the polls naturally
enhances the representation of the officially allowed opposition parties in the assembly,
hence increasing their bargaining capacity. Ultimately, this not only entails heavy
bargaining costs for the autocratic executive but also facilitates these parties’ autonomy
from the regime. Increases in the autonomy of such formations may be highly
consequential in the process of regime transformation if, for whatever reason, it occurs
during the assembly tenure (Mainwaring 1988).
Thus, voting for the officially allowed opposition parties can inflict damage on the
regime. The scope of this damage is determined by the probability of reducing the
assembly representation of the dominant pro-regime party, which is necessarily tied to the
corresponding growth in the representation of the official opposition. This makes it
possible to rewrite the above formula for strategic voting as follows by replacing the PB
term with PH, where H stands for the harm inflicted on the regime by reducing the scope
of its electoral support and the size of the assembly delegation of the dominant
pro-regime party. Upon this replacement, the above formula remains theoretically valid
for authoritarian conditions not only due to the above argument, which supports the
inclusion of the PH term but also because it can be reasonably expected that, for some
anti-regime voters, the notion of voting as a civic duty remains meaningful (Gandhi &
Ong 2019; Letsa 2020), and because the costs of voting occur irrespective of the political
context (Riker & Ordeshook 1968, p. 27).
This being said, it is important to supplement the above formula by adding three
components that are specific to authoritarian conditions. First, anti-regime voters under
authoritarianism often feel politically isolated and powerless, and see legitimate political
participation as meaningless (Conaghan 2005). These feelings can be assuaged by a
perceivably meaningful yet relatively risk-free opposition activity such as strategic voting.
Such satisfaction is likely to be greater when there are reasons to view strategic voting as
a concerted collective action rather than an act of individual resistance.
Second, Gschwend and Hooghe (2008) find that in a democracy, party supporters are likely
to refuse their support to a coalition of which their party is a member if they dislike their party’s
coalition partner. Gandhi and Ong (2019), who studied voters’ commitment to opposition
coalitions in a dictatorship, came to a similar conclusion. In a similar vein, anti-regime
voters may refuse to support at the polls those parties not perceived to have a credible
opposition stance. Thus, anti-regime strategic voting in an autocracy is influenced by the
degree of aversion felt by opposition voters towards such parties.
Third, anti-regime strategic voting under authoritarianism can be more costly for the
voter than is normally the case in democracies. These costs are higher when regime
agents are able to control the voting process and to intimidate voters (Frye et al. 2014,
2019; Hafner-Burton et al. 2018). In these conditions it may be less costly for an antiregime voter to abandon their strategic choice than to be punished. In particular, the wide
use of economic coercion to mobilise voters in Russia’s elections has been documented in
the literature (Frye et al. 2014).
826
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
Fourth, perceptions of outright election fraud can affect voters’ willingness to behave
strategically. If election returns are widely believed to be rigged, there is no reason to
support opposition candidates because they can be expected to lose anyway. Nevertheless,
rational abstention from voting, while observable in many authoritarian regimes, does not
make much sense because under the conditions of fraudulent elections, turnout figures
can be falsified by the authorities in order to ensure that their legitimacy claims are met, a
phenomenon widely observed in contemporary Russia (Moser & White 2017) and in
other autocracies (Lindberg 2005). Under such conditions, opposition-minded voters can
cast their votes against the official candidates either on the assumption that the ‘true’
results of the elections will be known by the authorities anyway, so that the
dissatisfaction of the populace will not go unnoticed, or on the assumption that a greater
turnout of opposition-minded voters will make electoral manipulation risker and more
difficult for the regime (Golosov 2018).
Opposition strategies in Russia’s authoritarian elections
In the middle of the 2000s under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Russia underwent a
transformation from an unconsolidated democracy (Shevchenko & Golosov 2001) into
an authoritarian regime that restricted civil liberties, controlled the media, and subverted
the court system (Hassner 2008). Two aspects of this transformation were particularly
consequential for electoral politics. By abolishing direct gubernatorial elections in the
regions, the Kremlin co-opted subnational elites and put them at the service of the
newly created dominant party, United Russia (Reuter 2017). Even more important was
the political party reform implemented in the period 2004–2007. As many as 60 parties
had been legally recognised in 2001–2004 (Golosov 2006). By introducing highly
restrictive party registration requirements, coupled with the prohibition on party blocs at
the national and regional level, the authorities managed to drastically reduce the number
of parties to 15 by the end of 2007, and to just six by the end of 2009. The surviving
parties were placed under the permanent threat of dissolution, which severely limited
their autonomy from the regime and undermined their willingness to form coalitions
with each other (Gel’man 2008; Gandhi & Reuter 2013, p. 145; Gill 2015, p. 114;
Hutcheson 2018).
In the 2011 parliamentary election, only four parties were able to cross the 7% legal
threshold of representation, including UR and three parties of the permitted opposition:
the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi
Federatsii—KPRF), the nationalist and statist formation misleadingly called the Liberal
Democratic Party of Russia (Liberal’no Demokraticheskaya Partiya Rossii—LDPR), and
a self-described centre-left party, called A Just Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossiya) led by one
of Putin’s close political associates. Despite these sterile conditions, UR’s share of the
vote, as officially reported, declined from 64.3% in 2007 to 49.5% in 2011.5
5
See, the websites of the Central Election Commission of Russia (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya
Rossiiskoi Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom and http://cikrf.ru, accessed 25 April
2021.
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
827
There were multiple reasons for UR’s less than successful performance in the 2011
elections. One of them can be linked to the strategy proposed by one of the opposition
leaders, Aleksei Naval’nyi, who called for the voters to support any party except UR,
which he referred to as ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ (White & McAllister 2014; Ross
2015; Smyth 2020). Although this term reflected the emotional tone of Naval’nyi’s
campaign, a significant strategic component was also in place. Rather than urging voters
to support parties that were ideologically distant from the regime, Naval’nyi emphasised
the ability of the official opposition parties to win seats, thereby reducing the
representation of UR. While it is impossible to estimate the consequences of Naval’nyi’s
strategy with any degree of precision, it is worth noting that in the 2011 elections, all
parties of the official opposition enhanced their results.
In the aftermath of the 2011 elections, the authorities softened registration requirements
for political parties. As a result, the number of parties greatly increased (Golosov 2014b).
But anti-regime opposition parties, including Naval’nyi’s party,6 remained unregistered on
various technical pretexts (Flikke 2016). At the same time, many of the newly registered
entities were allowed into the electoral arena to split the vote (Golosov 2015), with the
expectation that the increased number of wasted votes would skew the seat distributions
in favour of UR.
The results of the 2011 elections made the authorities reconsider their approach to
proportional representation. During the previous period of political development,
proportional representation had been introduced to consolidate United Russia. That goal
achieved, its continued unlimited use was too risky. In 2013 and thereafter, the use of
proportional representation was gradually subjected to limitations both at the national and
subnational levels of electoral politics. In particular, this included the restoration of a
mixed electoral system, with half the deputies to be elected in single-member districts by
the plurality rule in the national legislative elections.
These reforms made it imperative for Naval’nyi, who had, by 2018, emerged as a major
figure in Russia’s opposition camp (Dollbaum 2020; Kazun & Semykina 2020), to refine his
electoral strategy. On the one hand, the proliferation of parties undermined the strategy of
voting for any other party except UR because under the new conditions, the gains of this
strategy would be swept away by the high levels of vote wasting. On the other, the
increased importance of single-member district races made it possible to employ them,
quite consistently with international experience, as a major hub for strategic voting.
In November 2018, Naval’nyi announced the smart vote campaign. Its main purpose was
to urge opposition-minded voters to behave strategically by casting their votes for non-UR
candidates who had a reasonable chance of defeating the UR candidates. It was widely
recognised that Naval’nyi’s campaign had a significant impact on the results of the
September 2019 regional legislative elections in Moscow (Dollbaum 2019; Bol’shakov &
Perevalov 2020). One study presented empirically verified evidence that this was also the
case in the concurrent municipal elections in St Petersburg (Turchenko & Golosov 2021).
6
In 2012 through 2019, Naval’nyi attempted to obtain official registration for his party under the names of
People’s Alliance (Narodnyi Al’yans, 2012), Party of Progress (Partiya Progressa, 2014), and Russia of the
Future (Rossiya Budushchego, 2018). None of these attempts was successful.
828
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
Evidence on the 2019 smart vote campaign from other regions is scarce, and it is not clear
whether this strategy was efficient outside the biggest cities, where the share of
pro-democracy voters is relatively high (Greene & Robertson 2019). In September 2020,
the smart vote strategy was adopted in a greater number of localities, including
non-capital cities.
The theoretical argument presented in the previous section allows for the systematic
juxtaposition of Naval’nyi’s smart vote strategy with the expected properties of antiregime voting under authoritarianism. The core element of this model is the PH term.
The loading of the H term was the same as in 2011, as it was assumed that by defeating
UR’s candidates at the polls, anti-regime voters could inflict significant harm on the
regime. The main emphasis was on the P component. Indeed, a major challenge for the
strategy stemmed from the fact that in multi-candidate races, it was difficult to establish
which of the allowed opposition candidates had a reasonable chance of success.
Naval’nyi developed a set of online information resources that would assist the voters
in identifying viable candidates across a range of elections. In the 2020 elections, these
resources included a webpage, an application for both iOS and Android devices, and a
Telegram bot. A voter would receive advice on how to cast a ballot in a given electoral
district by simply providing their address. The main difference between the smart vote
strategy and VAAs is that, in democratic settings, the main purpose of VAAs is to
match users to specific political parties in accordance with ideological or policy
preferences (Garzia & Marschall 2016, p. 377), while the primary purpose of the smart
vote campaign was to enhance the electoral viability of non-UR candidates not closely
linked to the regime.
While the stated purpose of the smart vote campaign was to reduce the representation of
United Russia in representative assemblies, which was to be achieved by supporting those
non-UR candidates who had a reasonable chance of winning,7 little is known about how
Naval’nyi’s team actually selected these candidates. As Naval’nyi himself explained,
albeit in very general terms, ‘in order [to place the strongest non-UR candidates onto the
smart vote list], we are going to simply analyse previous election returns. Plus, [we have
to conduct] opinion polls. Plus, let’s say it bluntly, it is often clear which of the
candidates is the strongest one’.8 The role of opinion polls is particularly unclear. Even if
some polling had been conducted by the Naval’nyi team in the run-up to the most
important elections, such as the 2019 regional elections in Moscow (Naval’nyi 2019), it
was impossible to conduct meaningful survey research aimed at establishing most viable
candidates in thousands of municipal elections in which the smart vote campaign was
implemented in 2019–2020. The resources available to the political organisations led by
Naval’nyi, including his Anti-Corruption Foundation and the network of locally-based
organisations that operated under the name of Shtaby Naval’nogo (Naval’nyi
Headquarters) were not negligible, but they were obviously insufficient for large-scale
7
For a systematic exposition of the strategy by one of its key ideologists and organisers, see ‘Leonid
Volkov ob “umnom golosovanii”’, Novaya gazeta, 3 December 2018, available at: https://newtimes.ru/
articles/detail/173927, accessed 9 August 2021.
8
See, ‘Kak my budem pobezhdat’ “Edinuyu Rossiyu” na vyborakh. Umnoe golosovanie’, Navalny.com,
28 November 2018, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6017/, accessed 9 August 2021.
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
829
opinion polling, even according to the otherwise very optimistic accounts of Naval’nyi’s
supporters (Dergachev et al. 2021). Thus it would be reasonable to suggest that in most
cases, Naval’nyi’s analysts relied on previous election returns or, in the absence of such
information for the first-time runners, on subjective assessments based on their
understanding of the political situation in a given locality and factors such as a
candidate’s personal popularity, their embeddedness in political networks, and their
finances and media resourcefulness. Of course, there is no reason to assume that such
assessments were necessarily correct, but even if they were inaccurate, the
recommendations of the smart vote campaign could still be consequential for coordinated
anti-regime voting, which is central to our inquiry.
Turning to the voter side of the smart vote strategy, and consistent with our theoretical
reasoning, anecdotal evidence suggests that there were several motivations for
coordinated anti-regime voting. As explained by one voter, ‘why did I turn out? Because
it is my civic duty, because there is smart voting, because I do not want the hegemony of
UR to persist’.9 The component of satisfaction brought by participation in collective
action was also quite prominent in the smart vote campaign. As put by Naval’nyi in his
pre-election appeal to the voters, ‘this is our first experience of organised collective
action. The strategy of the authorities is wholly aimed at suppressing our will and
cultivating powerlessness. Remember that we are not powerless, just unorganised. To take
part in smart voting is a step towards organisation’.10 The costs of voting also could be
significant because, as noted in the literature, many Russians are vulnerable to electoral
intimidation, especially if they are employed in the public sector (Forrat 2018) or in statedependent firms (Frye et al. 2014, 2019). In other respects, the costs of voting in Russia
are relatively low (Birch et al. 2002).
The empirical setting and hypotheses
The empirical setting for this study is the September 2020 subnational elections in
Russia. All these elections were conducted concurrently on the so-called ‘unified day
of voting’ (edinyi den’ golosovaniya) when, according to the Russian law, it is
imperative to hold the majority of elections at the different levels of the country’s
complex administrative structure. The 2020 campaign embraced legislative elections in
11 out of the 85 federal units (regions) of Russia and city council elections in 22
regional capitals. In addition, there were plenty of local contests, including city
council elections in 12 cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants.11 There were also
many races in smaller localities, but they are not addressed in this study because the
smart vote campaign did not reach that level.
9
See, ‘V Peterburge—rekordno nizkaya yavka na vyborakh. Chitateli “Bumagi” rasskazyvayut, pochemu
vse zhe poshli golosovat’’, Bumaga, 9 September 2019, available at: http://paperpaper.ru/v-peterburgerekordno-nizkaya-yavka-n/, accessed 25 March 2021.
10
See, ‘Obrashchenie v “den’ tishiny”’, Navalny.com, 7 September 2019, available at: http://navalny.com/
p/6227/, accessed 25 March 2021.
11
One of these cities, Sterlitamak, had to be excluded from this study because there was no smart vote
campaign there.
830
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
Chief executive (gubernatorial) elections were also held in 18 regions. In these elections,
however, the Naval’nyi team advised voting for any candidate except the incumbent or, if the
incumbent was not on the ballot, except the candidate explicitly supported by the Russian
federal executive. The reason is that under a two-round majority system employed in
these elections, vote-wasting in the first round would be inconsequential. The smart vote
campaign did not provide any advice regarding preferable choices in party list elections
that were incorporated into the mixed electoral systems of many localities. None of them,
however, used purely proportional systems. Thus, the overall number of elections in this
study is 44.12 They took place, at different levels, in 29 regions of Russia, making for a
diverse sample that is broadly representative of the nationwide voting patterns.
In the 44 elections under investigation, as many as 1,082 seats were contested in singlemember districts and 85 in multimember districts. The specific effects of multimember
plurality rules in Russia’s subnational elections are not negligible, but they are addressed
in detail elsewhere (Golosov & Turchenko 2021). Overall, 1,167 seats were at stake. The
number of the smart vote campaign nominees was 1,155. Comprehensive lists of these
candidates were not published by campaign organisers. Our data on the candidates
selected for the smart vote list were derived mostly from the Telegram bot
(@smartvotebot). To get the available recommendations, we followed the routine
recommended to all voters, which was to provide the bot with addresses located within
specific districts drawn for a given election. Maps or descriptions of electoral districts
were extracted from the official websites of legislative or representative bodies that were
to be elected in 2020. As of March 2021, the smart vote recommendations were no longer
available.
An important peculiarity of the 2020 subnational elections in Russia was the
unprecedented spread of early voting countrywide. The Central Election Commission of
Russia (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii) sanctioned formal
provision for this on 24 July 2020, having established that the main election day, 13
September, would be preceded by two days of early voting. The official explanation of
such a provision was that early voting served the purpose to make the electoral process
‘as comfortable as possible’ for voters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, as is
widely recognised from previous experience, early voting in Russia limits the scope of
electoral observation, facilitates the intimidation of state-dependent voters, and simplifies
the use of electoral malpractice in many other ways (Bader 2016). A Russian election
watchdog, Golos, reported numerous cases when early voting was used to control voter
turnout in the September 2020 elections.13
Twenty political parties ran their candidates in different localities, and a solid number of
independents also contested the elections. In sum, there were 4,505 non-UR candidates, who,
ipso facto, had a chance of receiving votes via the smart vote campaign. Table 1 presents the
distribution of smart vote support across different party affiliations for the full sample of
candidates. The Table also reports detailed data on independents and five parties with the
12
The list of the included elections is presented in Table A1 in the online Appendix.
‘Itogi obshchestvennogo nablyudeniya za vyborami v edinyi den’ golosovaniya 13 sentyabrya 2020
goda’, Golosinfo.org, 15 October 2020, available at: https://www.golosinfo.org/articles/144816#2-2,
accessed 17 July 2021.
13
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
831
TABLE 1
NUMBERS AND ELECTORAL RESULTS OF CANDIDATES IN THE SEPTEMBER 2020
SUBNATIONAL ELECTIONS
Smart vote
KPRF
LDPR
A Just Russia
Independents
Motherland
Yabloko
Others
Total/Mean
Others
N
Mean vote share
N
Mean vote share
615
119
181
152
25
41
22
1,155
0.22
0.19
0.22
0.24
0.37
0.16
0.25
0.22
386
818
683
647
108
80
628
3,350
0.15
0.09
0.09
0.10
0.08
0.05
0.07
0.10
Note: All observed differences in means are significant at the 0.1% level (p < 0.001) in both independent t-tests and
Wilcoxon rank sum tests (all two-tailed).
Sources: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi
Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom, accessed 9 August 2021; collected by the authors from
the Telegram bot (@smartvotebot) of the smart vote campaign.
highest numbers of nominees supported by the smart vote campaign: the KPRF, the LDPR,
A Just Russia, Yabloko (Rossiiskaya Ob’’edinennaya Demokraticheskaya Partiya Yabloko),
and a minor nationalist party, Motherland (Rodina). As many as 981 out of 1,155 candidates
backed by the smart vote campaign were nominated by these parties, with a majority
belonging to the first three of them, while 152 smart vote candidates ran as independents.
Thus, smart vote support was heavily biased in favour of the main parties of the official
opposition and independents.
Table A2 in the online Appendix proves that this approach was consistent with the stated
goals of the smart vote campaign: both in 2020 and in the previous elections of 2015, these
categories of candidates tended to be more successful than the candidates nominated by
minor parties. It is important to mention that, learning from their experience of 2019, the
organisers of the 2020 smart vote campaign made their recommendations available briefly
before the elections. As a result, the authorities were left without an opportunity to deny
registration to the smart vote candidates. With only one exception, all of them remained
on the ballot on election day.
Turning to our working hypotheses, a note on the 2019 smart vote campaign is in order. In
major urban localities, Moscow and St Petersburg, the results of the elections met the
expectations of the smart vote campaign organisers in the sense that the shares of seats
held by United Russia in the elected assembly did indeed decrease quite visibly. In
Moscow, 20 deputies were elected to the city Duma (45 seats) with the support of the
smart vote, which was the best result obtained by opposition candidates since the early
2000s (Dollbaum 2019). Naval’nyi called the outcome of the smart vote campaign in
Moscow ‘fantastic’,14 even though Yabloko-linked scholars, particularly Bol’shakov and
Perevalov (2020), asserted that, while the smart vote campaign had helped some
14
‘Pobeda!’, Navalny.com, 9 September 2019, available at: https://navalny.com/p/6228/, accessed 9
August 2021.
832
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
opposition candidates, it had been a hurdle to others. However, the exact effects of the smart
vote campaign in Moscow on the electoral performance of United Russia are difficult to
estimate: officially, this party’s candidates did not contest the 2019 elections at all,
running as independents instead; and, more importantly, the Moscow data do not allow
for inference about how the smart vote campaign affected the performance of opposition
candidates.
The results of the 2019 smart vote campaign in St Petersburg were analysed at length in a
previous article (Turchenko & Golosov 2021). In St Petersburg, 5,305 registered candidates
were running for 1,560 mandates in the municipal assemblies. Of these, 1,313 people were
supported by the smart vote campaign. Each constituency had its own set of candidates.
However, the same people ran in different constituencies simultaneously (289 people). A
total of 94 candidates running in different constituencies had smart vote support in some
constituencies but not in others. Turchenko and Golosov (2021) compared the electoral
results achieved by these candidates in different constituencies and found they were
higher in those constituencies where smart vote support was provided. The accuracy of
this conclusion was ascertained by comparing the results achieved by only those 78 out of
94 candidates who had been nominated in different constituencies with the support of the
same party or as non-party candidates. A significant difference was found between the
results achieved by the same candidates with or without the smart vote support, so that
smart vote support provided the candidates with a surplus of about 7% of the vote on
average (Turchenko & Golosov 2021, p. 72). But the question of the campaign’s efficacy
in other localities remains open. As Turchenko and Golosov note, St Petersburg may be a
most-likely place for the ‘smart vote’ strategy to be efficient because, in the city, the
share of pro-democracy voters is relatively high. By the same token, the impact of the
‘smart vote’ strategy could be different in regions with greater shares of loyalist voters
(Turchenko & Golosov 2021, pp. 75–6). One of the purposes of our current analysis is to
resolve this problem.
Based on the model of strategic anti-regime voting presented in this article, we expect that
the intention of anti-regime voters to inflict harm on the regime, when coupled with two
other theoretically possible motives, the desire to perform the civic duty of voting and to
receive satisfaction from a risk-free opposition activity, affected elections results.
This leads us to the following hypothesis (H1), that smart vote support systematically
boosted the electoral results of its supported candidates across different-level electoral
campaigns. The smart vote campaign aimed to improve coordination amongst opposition
voters by directing their support to the strongest non-UR candidate. Yet for many
opposition-minded voters, the programmatic and/or policy stances of the strongest parties
of the officially allowed opposition, the KPRF, the LDPR and A Just Russia, were
unacceptable because they could be considered part of the regime, thus being no different
from UR. Aversion to these parties can be strong.
Based on this logic, we propose the second hypothesis (H2), that the impact of the smart
vote (if any) would be lower for the candidates of the three major official opposition parties
than for the nominees of other parties and independents.
The third hypothesis (H3) addresses the costs of voting from the angle of intimidation by
authorities. As mentioned above, many Russian voters are vulnerable to electoral
intimidation. The share of early voters in the 2020 elections was unprecedented. It could
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
833
have affected the efficacy of the smart vote campaign because early voting endows regime
agents with an increased capacity to intimidate vulnerable groups of voters (such as college
or university undergraduates, workers of state-owned or large private firms, or public
employees) and to direct their electoral choices. Our hypothesis is thus that the impact of
the smart vote (if any) would be lower if more people voted early.
A caveat regarding the third hypothesis is in order. While we expect that large-scale early
voting, resulting from the three-day extension for the ballot, would have affected the choices
of anti-regime voters, it could also be utilised to mobilise regime supporters and/or
politically indifferent voters. At the same time, the authorities could have used early
voting to hide electoral fraud, thus making the impact of the smart vote campaign less
apparent than it would have been in one-day elections. The structure of our data does not
allow us to disentangle these aspects of early voting.
Empirical analysis and findings
According to the first hypothesis (H1), smart vote support would increase the electoral
results of the opposition candidates across different-level electoral campaigns.
Preliminary evidence in support of this expectation is reported in Table 1. Consistent with
our expectations, the mean results of the smart vote candidates of different affiliations are
higher than those of other candidates. However, the interpretation of this finding is
complicated by a methodological problem also found in research on strategic voting in
different national settings (Alvarez & Nagler 2000). Do smart vote candidates obtain
higher results due to strategic voting, or do they perform better because their personal
resources or previous electoral experience, as perceived by the proponents and crafters of
the strategy, lead to their inclusion onto the smart vote list?
To resolve this problem, we relied on a quasi-experimental approach similar to the one
used in a study of the effects of campaign spending upon the electoral returns of
individual candidates in the elections to the US Congress (Levitt 1994). The approach is
focused on the observed cross-temporal differences in the electoral results of those
candidates who ran both in the elections under investigation and in the previous elections
held in the same districts or localities under unchanged party labels. Such candidates are
conventionally referred to as ‘repeat runners’. Previous research on electoral politics in
Russia has established that such candidates are widespread but rarely successful if they
do not enjoy the advantage of incumbency (Golosov 2014a), which is consistent with
evidence from different national electoral arenas (Squire & Smith 1984). The presence of
such candidates does however generate valuable data on how temporal variation in the
availability of certain resources, be it campaign funds or inclusion on the smart vote list,
affects electoral performance. Thus, it becomes possible to control for candidates’ assets
in statistical analysis.
In this study, we identify several categories of repeat runners. Overall, as many as 1,030
candidates in the 2020 elections had contested seats in the same representative assemblies
under the same party affiliations (or lack thereof) in the 2015 elections or, in several
cases, in the 2016–2019 byelections. In 2020, 213 out of these 1,030 repeat runners were
backed by the smart vote campaign, while 517 candidates were continuously affiliated
with UR. In addition, there was a group of 300 repeat runners who were neither
834
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
TABLE 2
MEAN OF THE DIFFERENCES IN THE RESULTS OF REPEAT CANDIDATES IN THE 2020
AND PREVIOUS SUBNATIONAL ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA
Test statistic (two-tailed)
Level
Full
sample
Regions
Capitals
Cities
Groups
N
Mean of the
differences
Dependent ttest
Wilcoxon signedrank test
Smart vote-supported
candidates
Other non-UR candidates
UR candidates
Smart vote-supported
candidates
Other non-UR candidates
UR candidates
Smart vote-supported
candidates
Other non-UR candidates
UR candidates
Smart vote-supported
candidates
Other non-UR candidates
UR candidates
213
0.05
0.00***
0.00***
300
517
50
0.00
−0.06
0.02
0.62
0.00***
0.10
0.64
0.00***
0.11
62
116
114
−0.00
−0.06
0.05
0.70
0.00***
0.00***
0.84
0.00***
0.00***
203
283
49
−0.00
−0.07
0.09
0.85
0.00***
0.00**
0.80
0.00***
35
118
0.03
−0.03
0.06†
0.09†
0.00**
0.11
0.07†
Notes: †p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.
Sources: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi
Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom, accessed 9 August 2021; collected by the authors from
the Telegram bot (@smartvotebot) of the smart vote campaign.
supported by the smart vote campaign nor affiliated with UR. From a methodological
perspective, such repeat runners can be viewed as a control group.
Table 2 presents test statistics to estimate the differences between the results received by
different categories of repeat runners in 2020 in comparison to the previous elections.15 As
shown both by the dependent t-test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, candidates backed by
the smart vote campaign improved their results markedly, while those of the candidates in the
control group did not change significantly.16 The results of UR’s candidates deteriorated
quite visibly, which is probably attributable to the declining popularity of the party. In
their entirety, these findings allow for the conclusion that the smart vote support did
enhance the electoral performance of those candidates who received it.
As a second step in this analysis, we posit that, if H1 holds, then the differences amongst
the electoral returns of the candidates supported by the smart vote campaign will be greater
than amongst the candidates of other groups because of the impact of strategic voting. Based
on the results of the one-way independent ANOVA and the Kruskal–Wallis test, reported in
Table A3 in the online Appendix, we conclude that the expected differences do exist.
Moreover, as shown in the post hoc tests presented in Table A4 in the online Appendix
15
Mean vote shares were taken for those repeat runners who ran in more than one election in 2015–2019.
It is important to mention that the smart vote effect was stronger in the subsamples of regional capitals
and other cities than in the subsample of regional legislative elections that comprised both urban and rural
electoral districts, and where more than three-quarters of all non-UR candidates (see Table A2 in the
online Appendix) were affiliated with major official opposition parties.
16
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
835
and visualised in Figure A1 in the online Appendix, the differences are statistically
significant when the smart vote group is compared to the other groups for the full sample
and, with some exceptions, for the subsamples defined by different types of elections.
This adds to the systematic evidence supporting our first hypothesis.
To test our second (H2) and third (H3) hypotheses, we performed several OLS regression
analyses with fixed effects. Individual non-UR candidates were units of analysis, and their
electoral results, measured as absolute vote shares, constituted the dependent variable. To
test H2, we built an interaction term between the smart vote support dummy variable and
a candidate’s affiliation with any of the three main official opposition parties, also
expressed as a dichotomous variable. In a similar vein, H3 was tested by using an
interaction term between the smart vote support dummy and the share of votes cast before
the main election day.
The analyses were performed on the full sample of candidates and on the three
subsamples defined by the levels of elections,17 which allowed for assessing the smart
vote effect under varying environmental constraints. We expected to see a stronger
effect in regional capital cities, as their populations are younger and better educated
than at the level of regions with both rural and urban settlements, as well as at the level
of smaller cities. We ran two identically designed models for each sample: the first
model does not contain interactions while the second does. All models clustered errors
at the electoral district level. The district-level controls included, first, a dummy
variable expressing the absence of UR’s nominee (1, otherwise 0)18 and second, the
overall number of candidates in the district. Candidate-level controls included the age,
gender, a dummy for repeat runners (1, otherwise 0), and a dummy for incumbents (1,
otherwise 0). The summary statistics of the variables are reported in Table A5 in the
online Appendix.
Table 3 reports the results regarding the vote shares received by non-UR candidates. The
coefficients of the smart vote support variable are positive and significant in all models. This is
consistent with the results obtained when testing H1 and indicates that these results remain valid
after controlling for a variety of district- and individual-level factors. It is also important to
mention that the coefficient of the smart vote support is bigger for the subsample of regional capitals.
The interaction term between the smart vote support dummy and the affiliation with one of
the main opposition parties is significant for the full sample, as well as for two out of the three
subsamples. As Figure 1 (plot A) and Figure A2 (plots A1 and A2) in the online Appendix
indicate, candidates’ affiliations with the main official opposition parties did, as expected,
reduce the advantage stemming from the smart vote support. Figure 1 (plot A) demonstrates
that the smart vote support improved the results of the candidates affiliated with main
official opposition parties by 14%, while for the independents and candidates affiliated with
other parties, an improvement by 18% can be observed. In the subsample of non-capital city
17
Single-member plurality systems were in use in all but two localities. Controlling for multimember
electoral districts by a dummy variable did not change the output presented in Table 3 (results are not
shown, available on request from the authors).
18
No such instances were registered in regional legislative elections, which explains the absence of this
variable in the related model. For multimember plurality districts, the variable was defined as the absolute
share of seats contested by United Russia.
Full sample
Smart vote support
Major official opposition
parties
Early voting
0.10***
(0.00)
0.01
(0.00)
−0.14***
(0.02)
SV × Major official
opposition parties
SV × Early voting
Lack of formal UR nominee
Number of candidates per
district
Age
Gender
Incumbency
Repeat runners
Constant
Election FE
Region FE
Observations
R 2/R 2 adjusted
0.10***
(0.01)
−0.01***
(0.00)
0.00***
(0.00)
−0.01*
(0.00)
0.25***
(0.02)
0.02***
(0.00)
0.12***
(0.01)
Yes
Yes
4,505
0.403/ 0.398
Regions
(2)
0.18***
(0.01)
0.01***
(0.00)
−0.05**
(0.02)
−0.03**
(0.01)
−0.27***
(0.03)
0.10***
(0.01)
−0.01***
(0.00)
0.00***
(0.00)
−0.01*
(0.00)
0.25***
(0.02)
0.02***
(0.00)
0.09***
(0.01)
Yes
Yes
4,505
0.425/ 0.420
Capitals
(3)
(4)
(5)
0.08***
(0.01)
0.01*
(0.01)
−0.20***
(0.01)
0.17***
(0.03)
0.02***
(0.01)
−0.14***
(0.01)
−0.05†
(0.03)
−0.21***
(0.03)
0.13***
(0.01)
0.00
(0.00)
−0.35***
(0.04)
−0.02***
(0.00)
0.00*
(0.00)
−0.01
(0.00)
0.15***
(0.04)
0.01†
(0.01)
0.20***
(0.02)
N/A
Yes
823
0.520/ 0.509
−0.02***
(0.00)
0.00*
(0.00)
−0.01
(0.00)
0.14***
(0.04)
0.01†
(0.01)
0.19***
(0.02)
N/A
Yes
823
0.551/ 0.540
0.07***
(0.01)
−0.01***
(0.00)
0.00***
(0.00)
0.00
(0.00)
0.23***
(0.03)
0.01*
(0.01)
0.16***
(0.01)
N/A
Yes
2,804
0.473/ 0.467
Cities
(6)
0.21***
(0.01)
0.01***
(0.00)
−0.26***
(0.04)
−0.05***
(0.01)
−0.37***
(0.06)
0.07***
(0.01)
−0.01***
(0.00)
0.00***
(0.00)
0.00
(0.00)
0.23***
(0.03)
0.01*
(0.01)
0.14***
(0.01)
N/A
Yes
2,804
0.489/ 0.483
(7)
0.06***
(0.01)
−0.01
(0.01)
−0.07*
(0.04)
0.12***
(0.02)
−0.00
(0.00)
0.00**
(0.00)
−0.04***
(0.01)
0.31***
(0.04)
0.03*
(0.02)
0.11***
(0.03)
N/A
Yes
878
0.324/ 0.312
(8)
0.11***
(0.02)
−0.01
(0.01)
−0.01
(0.04)
0.01
(0.02)
−0.19***
(0.04)
0.12***
(0.02)
−0.00
(0.00)
0.00**
(0.00)
−0.03***
(0.01)
0.31***
(0.04)
0.03*
(0.02)
0.10***
(0.03)
N/A
Yes
878
0.338/ 0.324
Notes: †p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001. Robust standard errors clustered on electoral district in parentheses. Individual non-UR candidates are units of analysis.
Sources: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom,
accessed 9 August 2021; collected by the authors from the Telegram bot (@smartvotebot) of the smart vote campaign.
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
(1)
836
TABLE 3
SMART VOTE SUPPORT UPON THE VOTE SHARES RECEIVED BY NON -UR CANDIDATES IN THE 2020 SUBNATIONAL ELECTIONS (OLS
MODELS , COEFFICIENTS / STANDARD ERRORS IN PARENTHESES )
COORDINATED VOTING AGAINST THE AUTOCRACY
837
FIGURE 1. MARGINAL EFFECTS OF THE SMART VOTE SUPPORT ON ELECTORAL
RESULTS
Note: Based on Model 2 in Table 3 (95% CIs are plotted).
Sources: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi
Federatsii), available at: http://izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom, accessed 9 August 2021. Data collected by the authors
from the Telegram bot (@smartvotebot) of the smart vote campaign.
council elections, the impact of the interactive term falls short of statistical significance. This
may indicate that, in relatively small localities, party affiliations as factors of voter choice are
less important than in party-structured electoral arenas such as whole regions or regional
capitals. Russia is not different from many other countries, new democracies and electoral
autocracies alike, in that party structures at the grassroots level are very weak (Hutcheson
2003). In all other respects, H2 is strongly supported by our analysis.
The interaction term between the smart vote support dummy and the share of early
voting is significant in all models. The biggest impact of the smart vote support, as
demonstrated by Figure 1 (plot B) and Figure A2 (plots B1, B2, and B3) in the online
Appendix, can be observed at very low levels of early voting, and the impact gradually
vanishes as early voting becomes widespread. As Figure 1 (plot B) shows, the smart
vote effect ceases to be significant when the share of early voting reaches 56%. These
findings are in line with H3.
Conclusion
Contemporary autocrats differ from their historical predecessors in many respects, and
one of the peculiarities of new authoritarianism is its reliance on the conventional
institutions normally associated with democracy. Today, quasi-competitive multiparty
elections lie at the core of the institutional order of authoritarian regimes. By imitating
democratic politics, these regimes consolidate their domestic position and international
standing. In order for elections to be both useful and safe for autocratic leaders, it is
838
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO & GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV
essential for them not to let anti-regime opposition into the electoral arena. At the same
time, an autocrat must ensure the participation of only those parties that, for a variety of
reasons, are viewed as incapable of either forming coalitions or mobilising the turnout of
anti-regime voters. A regime will seek to marginalise such voters, effectively
disenfranchising them through lack of acceptable choices.
Even under the conditions of electoral authoritarianism, however, it remains possible
for anti-regime voters to behave strategically by voting for those parties that, while
deemed harmless by the regime and therefore tolerated in the electoral arena, can
reduce the dominance of main pro-regime parties and undermine their claims of
overwhelming support in the electorate. In this article, we theoretically explicated the
calculus of the strategic anti-regime voter in a situation where the opposition parties
do not attempt to form any kind of coalition. The motivation of this voter combines
the goal of inflicting harm on the regime with an assessment of the likelihood of one
of the allowed candidates defeating the dominant party’s candidate. Amongst a
number of other elements, the resulting motivation structure includes the benefit from
carrying out the civic duty of voting, satisfaction from a perceivably meaningful yet
relatively risk-free opposition activity, aversion towards the programmatic and/or
policy stances of official opposition parties, which is expected to detract voters from
behaving strategically, and the amount of intimidation potentially faced by an
opposition voter.
This theoretical framework has been applied to strategic voting in one of the world’s most
salient electoral authoritarian regimes, Russia, by using the empirical evidence from the
September 2020 subnational elections that were held concurrently in a wide variety of
localities across the country. In these elections, Aleksei Naval’nyi’s smart vote campaign
urged voters to act strategically by casting their votes for the strongest non-UR candidates
not closely linked to the regime.
Our empirical analysis demonstrates the general validity of the strategic anti-regime
voting model presented in this article. The smart vote campaign boosted the electoral
results of its supported candidates in elections at different levels. At the same time,
consistent with the model, we found that the impact of the smart vote was reduced if
candidates lacked convincing opposition credentials. The analysis also shows that the
willingness of anti-regime voters to behave strategically can be affected by the scope of
voter intimidation available to the authorities. The study could be developed further by
using specifically designed opinion polls to test the weight of the individual components
of the model within opposition voters’ motivational structure.
MIKHAIL TURCHENKO , Associate Professor, Political Science Department, European
University at St Petersburg, 6/1A Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg, 191187, Russian
Federation. Email: mturchenko@eu.spb.ru http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8535-5473
GRIGORII V. GOLOSOV, Professor, Head of Political Science Department, European
University at St Petersburg, 6/1A Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg, 191187, Russian
Federation. Email: ggolosov@gmail.com http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9769-9230
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839
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