For a discerning statistical investigation into the evolution of provincial politics in Russia and their contribution to the consolidation of Vladimir Putin’s hold on the central government, there is no better place to begin than The Regional Roots of Russia’s Political Regime. More broadly, William Reisinger and Bryon Moraski lay bare one strategy by which national leaders in quasi-democratic regimes can manipulate electoral institutions to control regional elections and to select regional leaders (governors) so as to consolidate control over national institutions (and possibly to create an authoritarian regime). The book is the result of substantial original research in the collection and analysis of electoral data in Russia’s 80-plus regions (or “subjects of the federation”) over two decades. Reisinger and Moraski closely track the fates of governors in each region. They also use their findings about the competitiveness of regional elections to test the applicability of general theories of successful democratic transitions. The authors employ a variety of statistical methods—each appropriate to the question asked in each chapter—including regression analysis, survival analysis, and analysis of spatial autocorrelation. The exceptional effort that went into researching this book may get overlooked, since the authors so artfully draw the reader’s attention to their important substantive findings, rather than the process by which these findings were derived.

Although Reisinger and Moraski juxtapose their analysis to competing explanations for why democracy failed in Russia, a more precise definition of their objective is to reveal the process that explains how this was done by Russia’s leaders. The authors divide the politics of the independent Russian Federation in its first 20 years into three periods—the Yeltsin years (1991–99), the years under Putin while governors were still elected (2000–February 2005), and the Putin-Medvedev years when governors were appointed (2005–12). Comparisons among these periods permit them to build a general narrative of how President Putin has come to dominate Russian politics—and to assess more precisely how far he has actually come.

The book reveals navigation by a trial-and-error process, not according to a fully developed, predetermined action plan. Nonetheless, the outcome was that Putin consolidated control over national politics. He began by manipulating gubernatorial elections, with only some success, and only then turned to direct appointment of governors. Yet even Putin was constrained by conditions in many provinces, and so his strategy was to focus on the “swing regions” where conditions gave him the greatest opportunity to increase the number of United Russia seats in the State Duma (parliament) and to increase the presidential vote for himself. By making governors aware that their tenure could depend on delivering an overwhelming vote for the president and his United Russia party, Putin tried to reorder the incentives of governors.

Among the more interesting specific findings, and there are many in the book, is the analysis of the decision by Putin and his inner circle to end elections for governors and to appoint these from the center. Reisinger and Moraski contrast gubernatorial elections in the 1990s (Chapter 3) with the initial efforts of the Putin leadership to influence the outcomes of these elections in the early 2000s (Chapter 4). They find that as long as governors were elected, Putin’s influence over the outcomes was indirect and uncertain: The president could encourage candidates to challenge disfavored incumbents but this did not guarantee the incumbents’ defeat. The president apparently could not prevent challenges to favored incumbents or guarantee the favored incumbents’ victory against these challengers. Having tried elections as a mechanism to control the provinces and found that this did not yield the desired results, the Putin administration secured a change in the constitution that permitted the president to nominate the governors directly. The authors’ explanation for the lack of public outcry against the end of gubernatorial elections is less compelling: They contend that the outcomes in provincial elections had not been responsive to local socioeconomic conditions, and so the public saw little to lose by eliminating the elections. This actually would seem to create conditions for public demands for more responsiveness. The multiple sources of Russian public quiescence may go much deeper than the authors suggest.

Another interesting finding concerns the results of presidential appointments to governorships (Chapter 5): As one might expect, those governors who were best at delivering the vote for Putin and for United Russia in federal elections were more likely to be retained. Nevertheless, the president had to negotiate with local interests before removing an incumbent, and that prevented his interventions in some regions. Even the power to appoint governors did not give the increasingly authoritarian president unconstrained control.

Yet another interesting finding concerns the outsized role played by the ethnic-machine provinces (the republics) in delivering votes in national elections for the president and his party (Chapters 6–7). Reisinger and Moraski’s analysis of the Yeltsin period confirms the observation of others that the most successful of these machines were established early in the transition from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. The authors refer to these as “swing states” in national elections, but their evidence suggests that they are more like the “solid South” that first Democrat and now Republican presidents have counted on to win elections. Although several analysts have noted these machines (see Philip Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From, 2007), the authors’ analysis underscores the importance of the outsized vote they deliver within the differing logics of presidential and State Duma elections. According to Reisinger and Moraski, although these provinces tend to be smaller in population, they “alter” national outcomes disproportionately by their (unbelievably) high turnout and solid support for Putin and United Russia. Yet the authors see this as a very fragile foundation for authoritarian rule: Whether this predicts a weak spot on which the next regime-changing constitutional crisis will hinge remains something to watch carefully. Another topic for further exploration is whether this special role in sustaining the current president and his party in office has also brought an outsized role for the concerns of these ethnic-machine leaders in national and foreign policies.

There are a few points where the authors could have strengthened their analysis, such as in their analysis of the lack of popular outcry against the end of provincial gubernatorial elections, but these do not distract from the overall high quality of their thesis and arguments. The only claim that left this reader unconvinced pertained to the “diffusion of deference” in Chapter 8, but that may reflect the inherent difficulty in any cross-sectional analysis to demonstrate diffusion in the presence of so many cultural and socioeconomic conditions that also vary by region. Yet this is a minor shortcoming in a book that should be read by all students of Russian politics, and indeed by all students of semidemocratic/authoritarian politics more broadly.