Timothy Colton's latest work on the former Soviet Union, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia, breaks ground into new and exciting territory. He imports models of voting behavior, drawn mostly from the U.S. literature, into a postcommunist country. After a careful literature review and construction of a model, Colton applies the model to Russian voting behavior, using a series of three national surveys conducted in 1995 and 1996. The results of this methodical and groundbreaking work are engaging and fascinating and represent a major step forward in what social scientists can reap from studies of postcommunist states. The premise of Colton's book is that study of postcommunist politics has not always been informed by comparative theory and most work on voting behavior in Russia has not used a fully cross-national model.

Colton orders his research into several themes, including an examination of the socioeconomic determinants of vote choice; the development of partisan allegiances to parties and candidates; the impact of attitudes on vote choice; and what role personality, retrospection, and perspective evaluations play in elections. Throughout, he compares his results from the parliamentary elections to that of the presidential elections. Colton finds more similarities than differences in Russian voting behavior when comparing it with results in the West. For example, it is clear that socioeconomic characteristics such as age, rurality, and education have affected vote choice, particularly for the well-established Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In addition, there is compelling evidence for nascent partisan identification. Issues appear to have an impact on vote choice, as do evaluations of parties and candidates as well as evaluations of their past and future performance.

The book by Colton, who has written extensively on the Soviet Union and Russia, is a wealth of information for those who study Russian voting behavior, dealing with issues ranging from contact from campaign workers to the evaluation of parties on particular issues. The panel design of the survey allows Colton to make a convincing case of the stability of opinion on many issues. Colton's experience in studying Russia and his earlier work on public opinion and voting behavior are clear in the careful question design for the survey. For example, Colton makes a distinction among weak, moderate, and strong partisan identification, which is particularly important in understanding the origins and strength of possible party identification in a postcommunist state. In his study of the impact of attitudes about the economy, he is careful to clarify that Russians are not dealing with relatively small issues of policy but are coping with global change in their polity.

Colton deals deftly and well with the bewildering range of Russian political parties, election laws, and candidates, yet the book raises several points that offer scope for further research. For example, his survey data indicated that those who were well educated and more attuned to politics were more likely to be influenced by the media in elections. This raises two interesting questions. Although Colton sees this as positive, it also suggests that the media is immensely powerful if it has more influence among the most politically sophisticated. In addition, the book does not differentiate between the highly polarized state and commercial television broadcasts. Colton notes that there is a lack of trust in television; further studies have found that there is a high level of trust in the prostate, state-run media but not in the commercial media, which championed the case of some contenders for power in the 1995 elections. Meanwhile, he does see media as particularly important in Russia (p. 60): “The question of media impact is more piquant in protodemocratic Russia than in a settled democracy because of the disproportionate leverage the state, and business interests affiliated with it, have over mass communications.”

In Unexpected Outcomes: Electoral Systems, Political Parties, and Representation in Russia, Robert Moser uses Russia as a test case for hypotheses about the impact of electoral systems on party formation. Moser eloquently argues that Russia shouldn't be disregarded because the outcomes of electoral design were different from those predicted by theory. Rather, the “conclusion is simple, yet surprisingly absent from much of the neo-institutionalist research: context matters” (p. 4). Thus Moser makes a careful study of the Russian case to provide convincing evidence for his theory. Yet his argument is wider than a study of Russia or even the role of institutions in the formulation of democracy in postcommunist states. As he writes, it is “better to integrate the study of less developed democracies into comparative politics and develop hypotheses that describe and explain patterns of behavior found in these contexts” (p. 5). In this attitude, Moser joins many of the “new wave” of scholars of Russian politics in seeing the importance of integrating the Russian case into general comparative politics.

Why does Russia provide this laboratory? The irony is that Russia's electoral system is informed by political science research (as it now is a subject of the same). Faced with the need to create a party system in a matter of months after the revolt of parliamentarians in 1993, Russia's political advisers chose to implement a mixed electoral system for the 1993 parliamentary elections. Half of the 450 members of the lower house (the Duma) would be elected through a national party-list contest and half would be picked through first-past-the-post races in 225 single-member districts (SMD) across Russia. Moser considered this institutional design a perfect opportunity to study the impact of different electoral systems on party formation (and, to a lesser degree, on voting behavior). However, he is careful throughout the book to note that the Russian context also will inform the nature of the political “game.” Moser does find several elements to the formation of Russian political parties that he considers somewhat unique, Although he feels that other third-wave democracies aside from Russia have a high electoral volatility, weak party identification, and little party organization (p. 31), what is distinct in Russia is the large number of independent candidatess who contest and win elections. But rather than perceiving this as an argument for making Russia {sui generis}, he writes, “Given that weak party institutionalization is a common feature of third-wave democracies, the experience of the Russian case may have broader implications for many new democracies.”

In addition, Russia's party-list system defies the expectations of certain classic political theories, namely, Duverger's law and the Downsian spatial analysis of party preference. Rather than dismissing Russian politicians or voters as irrational or immature, however, Moser makes a careful analysis of possible rational preferences for an explosion of political partics by the 1995 elections. He finds that “party proliferation in the PR tier seems in part to be one of hidden rationality caused by the many competing incentives of the mixed electoral system” (p. 39) like nested games. Moser also argues that the proliferation of candidates in the SMD tier was caused by the weakly institutionalized party system. In Chapter 6, Moser tackles the puzzle of why Russian voters have twice elected a fairly reactionary Duma and a relatively reformist president a few months later. Moser argues that it is not irrational or even particularly unformed voting preferences; rather, the differing outcomes are the result of the institutional design of the electoral system. Moser uses an analysis of voting patterns for broad ideological camps to show that there was relatively little change from the Duma elections of 1995 to Yeltsin's election in 1996; what changed “were the rules of game that structured the vote choice and translated the vote into political power” (p. 97).

However, in this analysis some of the context does in fact matter, in that it is difficult to categorize particular party groupings, as Russian parties are often based less on ideology than they are on personalities or the needs of particular bureaucrats. Moser posits that the key factor in Yeltsin's surprising reelection in 1996 was the consolidation of reformist and centrist voters behind a single candidate. His arguments on the importance of ideology and the presence of rational voting behavior should, however, have taken more into account some of the distortions of the 1996 presidential campaign. Notably, Yeltsin enjoyed full control of the primary state and commercial television channel, as well as virtually unlimited access to funds and political “pork” as both a carrot and a stick for voters. While it is worthwhile to assess and measure voter preferences, it could be argued that there needs to be some additional compensation for the particularly unfair elements in the Russian political system, namely, the domination of the media, public funding, and public office by some political parties. These distortions have become more important over time, particularly in the most recent Russian elections (not covered in this book).

Both Colton and Moser's books provide an important contribution to the understanding of voting behavior and party formation in Russia. More importantly, they use comparative theory to inform the discussion about Russia and, in turn, illuminate points about this theory in general. Russia is a fascinating laboratory for political scientists, as parties develop in a sort of “Big Bang” rather than at the evolutionary pace that they did in much of the West. As such, it is possible to observe and measure phenomena such as the development of partisan identification and the relative effect of party-list structure on party formation in an accelerated manner.

Both Colton and Moser are guardedly optimistic about the development of democratizing patterns in voting behavior and party organization along Westernized lines. There is worrying evidence, however, that any movement toward a Westernized, liberal party system in Russia has stopped. As both of these books are based on studies of elections in 1996 or earlier, it was impossible to include in-depth analysis of the 1999 and 2000 elections in the volumes. Preliminary studies indicate that while studies of voting behavior and party organization are still relevant, the ability of powerful state bureaucrats to use ephemeral political parties and the media to manipulate electoral results has increased markedly. Realistically, future studies of elections in Russia must now take into account theories of propaganda and authoritarian “staging” of elections that are more reminiscent of the former Soviet Union than holding promise for a democratic Russia. However, the way in which Colton and Moser have integrated the study of Russia into the larger questions of the discipline remains an example for other scholars to follow.