This chapter examines the most visible and politically important act of conventional citizen participation: turning out to vote in a national election. Patterns of political participation are influenced by a variety of institutional factors, such as the type of electoral system and the number of political parties in a country, along with individual socioeconomic factors such as a person’s educational attainments or income. A particular problem in many previously authoritarian societies is the absence of a diverse civil society, so that the social trust upon which a healthy democracy depends is often absent. The chapter first considers various dimensions of political participation before discussing voter turnout in democratic countries. It then analyses the effects of institutional arrangements such as election rules, the type of electoral system, and the party system on political participation. Finally, it describes some of the factors that determine whether or not citizens participate in politics.

Under communism, official election returns suggested that around 99 percent of the electorate voted. Since then, election turnout in Russia has declined dramatically, with the 2016 Duma election recording the lowest level of turnout since democratization. This paper uses national survey data collected just after the 2016 election to test four hypotheses to explain this low turnout, and to evaluate its consequences for party support. The results show that a voter’s resources, the degree of mobilization and his or her sense of efficacy all influence the probability of voting. A belief in electoral integrity also matters, but only insofar as it is related to support for the Putin regime. The level of differential turnout across the regions in the 2016 election was exceptional. Both aggregate and individual level analyses confirm that United Russia gained considerably from the higher turnout that occurred in the remoter regions, and from lower turnout in the urban regions. United Russia has pursued a strategy of voter demobilization in areas of low support, and this explains its continuing electoral success.

This article aims at an empirical verification of prosecutors' partisan behavior through a case study based on the Russian President Yeltsin and Putin periods. According to Gretchen Helmke's original theory of strategic defection, dependent judges may occasionally check their principal, the executive leadership, by withdrawing their support in the course of an electoral cycle. However, a modified theory of strategic defection can be readily applied to civil-law prosecutors' behavior in new presidential democracies, where several presidents dominated that office during most of their tenure but experienced prosecutorial defection in their final phase. Russia provides a textbook case for examining the modified theory in relation to prosecutors' partisan behavior against an incumbent president. Meanwhile, this paper uses within-case analysis based on a qualitative method, because the methodological approach can have more advantages in discovering whether prosecutors acted really' strategically when an incumbent government was outgoing in Russia, and in further explaining a pattern of prosecutors' partisan attitudes in new presidential democracies, through the modified version of Helmke's theory.

At the third BRICS summit on Hainan Island in 2011, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev claimed that the BRICS countries—with the addition of South Africa to Brazil, Russia, India and China—now inclu...

There has been an extensive debate about the relationship between economic development and democratisation. One view is that economic development is a pre-requisite for democracy. Another view is that the emergence of democracy is largely random, and economic prosperity is important only for ensuring democracy's survival in the event of a crisis. This essay contributes to this debate by using public opinion surveys collected over an extended period to examine patterns of economic change and public support for democracy in China and Russia. The results show that education and, to a lesser extent, social mobility and economic attitudes, play an important role in promoting pro-democracy attitudes in both countries. The results have implications for democratisation, with an increasingly large tertiary-educated middle class acting as a potential driver for democratisation in China, and for the return of a free, fair and competitive democracy in Russia.