Incumbents’ Incentives and Party Building in a Federal System: New Evidence from Russia

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between federalism and the institutionalization of political parties. Institutionalized political parties maintain a professional bureaucracy, regulate their internal affairs by elaborate rules and procedures, and have a policy agenda that is consistent over time. Party leaders can avoid investing in a party organization by delegating voter mobilization, campaigning, and the production of other traditional party services to non-party actors. Parties can choose to outsource for a number of reasons. In countries with a centralized structure of political finance, outsourcing can reduce expenses associated with maintaining regional party organizations. In clientelist regimes, outsourcing can mitigate the commitment problem by facilitating monitoring of voter behavior and punishing defectors. Thus, from the standpoint of candidates and parties, outsourcing is an attractive campaign strategy. Yet, there is a dearth of literature that examines when, how, and why parties outsource voter mobilization services to non-party actors. This study fills in this lacuna by first demonstrating that both clientelistic and programmatic parties do in fact outsource voter mobilization to non-party actors and then developing and testing a formal model that provides insights into how federalism affects party building. The model predicts that decentralization increases party leaders’ willingness to invest in party organization. This hypothesis is tested using a unique dataset on intra-party transfers and outsourcing in Russian legislative elections in 2003 and 2007.