Quantitative Empirical Indicators of the Dynamics of Russia’s Political Regime, 2004–2022

Abstract This article develops a set of quantitative indicators that allow for tracing the dynamics of Russia’s political regime along two dimensions: electoral evaporation, understood as a gradual diminishing in the level of competitiveness; and autocratic personalization, understood as the rise of the personalist traits of the regime. The values of the indicators offered in this article are derivable from the objective data, not from expert coding, which increases data reliability. The indicators are country-specific. This reduces the loss of information that is unavoidable in cross-national research. Electoral evaporation is measured on the basis of election results, while for measuring autocratic personalization, the article builds a composite index involving several indicators of personalist rule. The parallel tracing of these indicators’ values throughout the period under observation, 2004–2022, shows that the evaporation of the electoral component of the regime has occurred largely in parallel with the rise of its personalist component. At the same time, slow-downs in one of the components could be compensated by the accelerated increase of the other, to the effect that the authoritarian transformation of the regime continued to progress. There were also instances when the indicators’ values concurrently increased after periods of decline on both parameters.