Dec. 15, 2020, 2:38 p.m.
Editor’s Note
Dear colleagues and friends,
We are happy to present the fourth (second in 2020) issue of our journal, which includes three papers, a virtual roundtable discussion and two book reviews.
The paper by Arkadii Lyubarev serves as the opening act, where he describes how Russia’s party system developed following the 2012 reform. The issues covered in the article include party number dynamics – how new parties were created and then dissolved in droves – as well as electoral participation of parties. The author concludes that the reform did not bring any significant changes to the party system, analyzing the underlying causes of such an outcome.
The paper by Konstantin Zhuribeda presents an analysis of municipal elections in Krasnoyarsk Krai. Several things make Krasnoyarsk Krai unique from the point of view of electoral research. The region has been using a mixed electoral system the longest in the counry – since the 1990s. Krasnoyarsk Krai is also the region that brought back the “None of the above” vote to its municipal elections after a long break. Overall, it is clear why municipal elections in Krasnoyarsk Krai would be of interest to researchers.
The paper by Alexey Szydlowski raises the issue of the legal nature of election commission working group. The paper was prompted by a court case that challenged the denied registration of Novye Lyudi (Rus. for “new people”) party list in Belgorod Oblast. However, the issues addressed in the paper are more fundamental and go beyond just an isolated case, concerning legal principles of electoral management activity and passive suffrage.
In this issue, we introduce a new format in the Discussion section: a virtual roundtable discussion on using mathematical methods to detect electoral fraud. This is quite a charged subject, especially since it stands at a crossroads of legal, political, social and mathematical sciences. We asked six questions to 11 experts experienced enough in both electoral issues and the use of mathematical methods, and now present their thought on the issue to our readers.
The issue concludes with two book reviews: Governors in Russia: Between Elections and Appointments by Aleksandr Kynev, reviewed by Vladimir Gelman, and A View of Elections in Russia: Inside, Outside, Sideways by Andrei Buzin, reviewed by Dmitri Oreshkin.
I hope the new issue will further secure the journal’s status in academic circles and the array of topics and authors will continue to expand.