I am grateful to the editors of Government and Opposition for the opportunity to revisit the arguments outlined in my 2007 article, ‘Electoral System Reform in Democracy's Grey Zone: Lessons from Putin's Russia’.Footnote ¹ I focus my attention on the different ways that Kenneth Wilson,Footnote ² in the preceding pages of this issue, misunderstands and misrepresents the contentions of that work. In addition, I argue that Wilson's response fails to contribute much beyond elaborating on many points that my article already made.

Wilson begins his critique by questioning the argument that United Russia's (UR) deputies elected under proportional representation (PR) will be less likely to violate party discipline than the party's single-member district (SMD) deputies. He states that United Russia's deputies ‘are not any more beholden to party leaders under a closed-list PR system than they were under the mixed system’ because the centralized nature of United Russia allowed ‘the party leaders (or more accurately, the presidential administration)’ to remove disloyal deputies from the party ticket.Footnote ³ In other words, he argues that control over list placement is a lesser means for controlling party deputies. He then goes on to provide an example of how a list deputy was expelled from the party for requesting that the Constitutional Court protect UR deputies from pressure from the presidential administration.

Unfortunately, this not only misses the point but the example is also irrelevant. Changing the electoral system from the previous mixed system to a solely PR system was, as I originally argue, about keeping United Russia's SMD deputies in line, not its list deputies. Understanding this explanation requires some counterfactual reasoning. Regional politicians elected to the national legislature via SMDs are less likely to be concerned with being expelled from the party of power if: (1) the option of running as an independent continues to exist in subsequent election cycles; or (2) the benefits of remaining with the party of power are uncertain (e.g. if the party is largely built around a popular individual and the political future of that individual is not known). Eliminating the SMD mandates obviously takes the first condition off the table. Regarding the second, today one might doubt whether the fate of United Russia was ever in question, as Wilson seems to do. However, this bias of presentism ignores the context at the time. Not only had Russia struggled to maintain a party of power from one election to the next (a point I explicitly make on p. 552 of the original article) but concerns and speculation calling into question the long-term coherence of United Russia also began after the 2003 Duma election. Prior to United Russia's Fifth Congress, on 27 November 2004, Russian media coverage regularly highlighted the party's falling approval ratings and growing troubles. These troubles included the defection of Duma deputies to join the ‘rival Rodina party’, as Ivanov labelled it.Footnote ⁴ Such defections added fuel to rumours of a possible split within the party of power. While Ivanov says that the party's 2004 Congress should have dispelled speculation of a United Russia split, I argue that the 2005 changes to Russia's election system played a more definitive role in shoring up the party's unity.

The preceding discussion is important because, as Wilson concedes, I do not actually contend that United Russia was unable to enforce party discipline. Rather I argue that: (1) maintaining party unity under the mixed electoral system would be more difficult during a period of uncertainty since defectors would have a natural outlet to continue their political careers – by running as independent deputies in SMD contests – and (2) the methods used to maintain party discipline in a legislature elected under the mixed system were more costly and less efficient than just eliminating the SMD elections. To substantiate the former, I discuss the recurring success of independent deputies in Russian legislative elections, citing Moser and Scheiner's (2004) data that nonpartisans made up 52 per cent of Duma deputies in 1993, 34 per cent in 1995 and 46 per cent in 1999.Footnote ⁵ On the latter point, I draw on work by Smyth,Footnote ⁶ although Remington makes a similar argument:

It is precisely the previous success of independent deputies in Russia's SMD elections that motivates the article's statistical analysis. The goal is to determine whether there were aspects of the 2003 Duma election that may have led the Kremlin to question its ability to maintain the loyalty of United Russia's SMD candidates. The findings suggest that the answer is yes. United Russia's success in the SMD contests in 2003 surpassed the total of SMD seats that any other single party had won in any past election. At the same time, United Russia appears to have relied heavily on regional politicians – those most likely to have independent bases of power – to attain this success.

Another criticism that Wilson levels against the article is my suggestion that eliminating the SMDs could inhibit other parties from capitalizing on regional politicians in the same fashion that United Russia had in 2003. Specifically, he argues that the People's Party's performance ‘tells us absolutely nothing about opportunities for the Kremlin's rivals to win SMC seats’ since the ‘Kremlin's grip on electoral politics is such that it is inconceivable that the People's Party would have won 17 seats if it had been an opposition party’.Footnote ⁸ But this line of reasoning fails to accept the possibility that parties that begin with the backing of the Kremlin in one election could subsequently challenge the Kremlin. In other words, it ignores an important dynamic of Russian party politics during Putin's tenure: a Kremlin-sponsored party, Rodina (or Motherland), did in fact emerge as a critic of the Kremlin – some would even say a ‘rival’ (see the above quote from Ivanov). And, again, during periods of uncertainty, allies-turned-rivals can become important agents of change, a lesson well illustrated by Georgia's Rose Revolution, in which key members of the opposition had previously held positions in President Shevardnadze's regime.

Third, Wilson contends that my article ‘implicitly assumes…that the party-system reforms passed after 2003 were introduced for completely different reasons to those passed before 2003’.Footnote ⁹ In other words, he asserts that it ignores the link between Putin's first-term reforms and his second-term reforms. But, in reality, I do discuss reforms that span both Putin's first and second terms in office. Indeed, these developments are part and parcel of my central arguments: ‘In other words, the SMD half of Russia's electoral system had the potential to undermine Putin's broader reform agenda.’Footnote ¹⁰ As I put it, ‘Putin appears to be reining in Russia's regions while simultaneously promoting party development,’ and the electoral system reforms ‘can be viewed as protecting United Russia from the centrifugal forces that could impede [its] preservation’.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, Wilson's discussion of Putin's reforms as checks ‘on centrifugal forces’ and as ‘systematizing the party system and centralizing the political system’Footnote ¹² echoes a central current from my article. Yet my work goes one step further. It complements this broader contextual discussion with a quantitative analysis that tests whether there were ‘certain aspects of the 2003 Duma election that led the Kremlin to question its ability to maintain the loyalty of United Russia's SMD candidates’.Footnote ¹³

Wilson continues his critique by suggesting that my failure to consider the link between first- and second-term reforms explains why I pose the elimination of the SMDs as a puzzle. In actuality, though, and as indicated above, I was no more puzzled than Wilson was. Wilson's contribution, then, seems mostly to reiterate the developments that I had already used to ground my own analysis: reforms that were ‘linked to increasing the federal government's leverage over the regions’Footnote ¹⁴ and reforms that ‘could contribute to the creation of a lasting party of power’.Footnote ¹⁵

So why, in the original work, do I suggest that the decision to eliminate the SMD seats to the Duma is puzzling? I assert that this change to Russia's electoral system is puzzling when one places it in comparative perspective; something that common sense would dictate. In other words, how does the existing literature on electoral system change inform the issue of electoral system change in Russia? If that general literature falls short in a specific case, can lessons from that case in turn inform our general understanding of electoral system change? These are questions that Wilson has the privilege of ignoring, only because such framing was a critical component of my work, which he then misrepresents. As a reminder, I argue that the Russian case can help flesh out the dynamics surrounding the adoption of more proportional electoral systems in transitioning states. While Birch's cross-national statistical analysis suggests that countries using SMDs will either adopt more proportional systems or fail to democratize,Footnote ¹⁶ the case of Russia illustrates how the adoption of a more proportional system can complement – even signify – the failure to democratize. Even more so, I try to explain why, again in comparative perspective, the dynamic of electoral system change may play out differently in Russia to the way it does elsewhere. Here I draw on Rose and Shin's discussion of democratization backwards while returning to the issue of how the SMD portion of Russia's electoral system undermined incentives for party-system consolidation there.Footnote ¹⁷

Unfortunately, Wilson's critique continues to struggle with a failure to distinguish between a discussion of the general literature and the analysis of a specific case. Towards the end, he suggests that I believe the move to a pure PR system will be good for democracy in Russia because such systems not only generally ‘grant smaller parties representing specific societal interests a better chance of attaining seats in parliament’ but ‘are also believed to enhance the feeling among ethnic or societal minorities that they have legitimate and substantial access to the political process’.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, this is not one of the reasons I give for why the change may be good for democracy in Russia over the long haul. Rather, this quotation comes from a discussion of the general literature on the advantages and disadvantages of different electoral systems – that is, it is used to help situate the Russian case in the existing state of knowledge. The reason I give for why electoral system reform may be good for democracy's long-term prospects in Russia comes 20 pages later: ‘Eliminating the SMD segment of the electoral system, therefore, should encourage Russia's party system to consolidate, eventually.’Footnote ¹⁹ Even then, I emphasize that other tools of electoral manipulation are likely to impede democracy's short-term prospects in Russia.

Still, I take issue with Wilson's argument that it is ‘nonsensical’ to consider the effects of the electoral system changes on the representation of societal and ethnic minorities in Russia. Wilson suggests that such a research agenda would be a waste of time since the 7 per cent legal threshold ‘makes it impossible for smaller parties to attain seats in parliament’ while the existing party law ‘prohibits the registration of parties on racial, national or religious bases’.Footnote ²⁰ Yet such research would only be ‘nonsensical’ if minority representation could only occur through the election of racially, nationally or religiously based parties, which is obviously not the case. Under closed-list PR, party control over list placement can influence minority representation. Indeed, Robert Moser's 2001 book illustrates how some ethnic minorities – that is, not necessarily ethnic parties – actually performed better under the PR portion of the Duma's electoral system than via the SMD segment.Footnote ²¹ While the critical factor for success is most likely the level of assimilation,Footnote ²² understanding how a switch to an only-PR system from a mixed electoral system might influence minority representation cannot be so easily dismissed as irrelevant.

A final critique of my work that Wilson offers is that the arguments ‘that these reforms were intended to establish a dominant party are unconvincing’ since United Russia was already dominant following the 2003 Duma election.Footnote ²³ In reality, my original article acknowledges that the 2003 Duma elections ‘provide fodder for speculation that a dominant-party state had begun to emerge’.Footnote ²⁴ In fact, the central tenet of the original article is that United Russia's quantitative success granted the Kremlin the luxury to focus on the quality of its support. At the same time, I submit that to consider a party accurately to be dominant the party's future should be relatively certain: ‘Until political parties prove to be vehicles vital for political success, the position of a party of power will always remain tenuous.’Footnote ²⁵ This is why the work explicitly uses phrases such as maintaining party dominance and lasting party of power: ‘Weakening [well-entrenched regional] politicians, therefore, emerges as a logical step for an administration interested in creating a lasting party of power.’Footnote ²⁶

In conclusion, the move from a mixed electoral system in Russia to one where seats are only allocated using party-list proportional representation stands as an intriguing development in the post-Soviet space. The change should be of interest not only to scholars focusing on the region, but also to those examining the politics of institutional change from a broader, more comparative perspective. Yet, understanding such changes often requires situating them into a country's broader domestic reform agenda. In Russia, Putin's agenda entailed reining in the country's regions while also promoting a more stable – or, more accurately, one-party dominant – party system. Although one may never have questioned the long-term success of United Russia, there are reasons to doubt that the present situation was preordained. As for United Russia's political future, it is worth remembering not only that institutional changes often produce unanticipated consequences, but also that a sizeable swing in the electoral pendulum can turn a party-list PR system with a high legal threshold against an incumbent party.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, under the right – although at this point, unlikely – circumstances, the electoral system changes promoted during Putin's presidency could help loosen United Russia's grip on power, if genuinely competitive elections return.