Russian Duma Elections

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As the vote counts are being finalized for this election held 18 September, we have the following results for the Russia legislative elections (the Duma):

  1. United Russia (Putin’s party) = 54% of popular vote
    • 343 seats, up from 238 in 2011.
  2. Communist Party (yes, those dinosaurs) = 13%
    • 42 seats, down from 92 in 2011.
  3. Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (mad Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s party) = 13%
    • 39 seats, down from 56 in 2011.
  4. A Just Russia (a moderate, well-behaved reformist party) = 6%
    • 23 seats, down from 64 seats in 2011.

Two other seats are held by two other parties. Fourteen parties participated in the election. Duma members serve for 5 years (next Duma election is in 2021).

A significant part of the story though is voter turn-out. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, voter turn-out used to be very high. Even in 1990 (under Gorbachev) it was 77%. It was 60.1% in 2011. It was 47.88% in this election (and there is some question about this figure). It is the lowest turn-out figure to date. In the two major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg turn-out was low. For Moscow it was less than 35%, down from 66% in 2011. This is worth noting. There were no major post-election protests, unlike in 2011. Crimea did vote in the Russian election.

Several opinion polls from September shows United Russia with 39.3 to 43% of the vote and two exit polls show it with 44.5 and 48.4% of the votes. There were some voting irregularities reported. United Russia won 54.2% of the popular vote in an election of with a turn-out of 47.88%.

United Russia now has 343 out of 450 seats in the Duma. This is 76% of the seats. Half the seats were elected based upon proportional voting based upon party lists and half were elected based upon single-member constituencies. This was a change from the 2011 elections. United Russia does have a “supermajority” which now allows them to unilaterally change the constitution. This is probably a very important point. For all practical purposes, Russia is now a “single-party democracy.”

From 1999 to 2013 the Russian economy boomed at unprecedented levels. From 2014 to the present, it has been in decline. Next election is the presidential election of March 2018.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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