№ 1 - 2005
Golosov G.V.
A Manufactured Majority: Vote–Seat Conversion in the 2003 Duma Elections

The political success of the Unified Russia party in the 2003 Duma elections took place not so much in the electorate, for its list received a modest 37.6 per cent of the vote, but rather as a result of vote–seat conversion that allowed it to create a super-majority in the assembly. The article identifies several institutional and political mechanisms that made this result possible: a high level of party system fragmentation, with, at that, against all vote practiced, in the proportional tier of the electoral system; a lack of territorial bases of electoral support to opposition parties in the single-member tier of the electoral system; and latent coalition strategies in single-member districts, as a result of which many elected deputies were bound to join the Unified Russia faction.