Parovozy (Russia)

Parovozy 🇷🇺
Location: Russia
Definition: High-profile electoral candidates included in a party list to attract votes, but who have no intention of taking up their seat if elected
Keywords: Russia – FSU – Elections – Parliament – Political party – Virtual politics
Author: Ben Noble
Affiliation: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

By Ben Noble, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

A parovoz (Russian: a ‘locomotive’, plural parovozy) is a high-profile electoral candidate included in a party list with the aim of attracting votes for the party in an election, but who has no intention of taking up their seat if elected. Such well-known candidates include regional governors, national-level politicians, heads of large enterprises, sportspeople, and celebrities. Once the parovoz foregoes their seat, a less well-known individual from lower down on the party list takes up their spot in the elected legislative assembly. The aim of using such ‘poster-candidates’ is to attract support for the party (Tkacheva 2009). The metaphor of a ‘locomotive’, therefore, conveys the fact that the well-known candidates ‘drive’ support for the party. The term is frequently used in media reporting on legislative elections in post-Soviet Russia. For example, Russian journalists used the term when Vladimir Putin headed the party list of United Russia (UR) – the ‘party of power’ created by the Kremlin (Reuter 2017) – in the 2007 elections to the State Duma (the lower chamber of the two-chamber national parliament, the Federal Assembly) (Satarov 2007). Putin declined to take up his seat in the Duma, remaining president, before becoming prime minister in May 2008. Overall in the 2007 federal-level parliamentary elections, 132 candidates declined to take up their seats in the Duma – 116 from UR, nine from Just Russia, four from the Communist Party (KPRF), and three from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) (Golos 2016).

Understanding the use of parovozy requires a basic overview of electoral rules in Russia. Post-Soviet Russia has seen the use of two different electoral systems to fill seats in legislative assemblies: party-list proportional representation (PR); and plurality (‘first-past-the-post’) election in single-member districts (SMD) (Hutcheson 2018: 15). The use of one or both of these systems has varied by political level – municipal, regional, or federal – and over time. For example, elections for the sixth convocation of the State Duma in 2011 used a pure party-list PR system, whereas elections for the seventh convocation in 2016 used a mix of the systems, with 225 Duma seats filled by PR and 225 by ‘first-past-the-post’.

The use of parovozy relates only to PR elections. If the victor of an SMD race were to give up their seat, then a by-election would need to be held. Russian electoral legislation does not impose penalties on electoral candidates who forego taking up their seats. Indeed, Hutcheson (2018: 165) reports that,

[o]n some occasions, so many people have passed on their seats that the person who has ended up being elected was so far down the list at the outset that he or she did not even appear on the ballot paper.

In addition, no rules prevent the same candidate from appearing on multiple party lists – that is, for different electoral races – at the same time. Thus, Vladimir Zhirinovsky – the leader of LDPR – was able to head the party’s list of candidates in three separate municipal elections in Tatarstan in 2020 (Antonov 2020). There was never any prospect that Zhirinovsky would give up his seat in the federal-level State Duma in order to take up one of these municipal-level seats.

The use of parovozy is not restricted to United Russia, as the Zhirinovsky example shows. However, UR has used ‘locomotive’ candidates to a greater extent than other political parties (Hutcheson 2018: 166). The practice is, therefore, a piece of ‘political technology’ – an ‘administrative resource’ – that is used most often to advantage the authorities. Insofar as the practice distorts the ties of endorsement and accountability between voters and politicians, the use of parovozy chimes with Wilson’s (2005) notion of ‘virtual politics’. Indeed, the Russian ‘Movement for the Defence of Voters’ Rights “Golos”’ has argued that running parovozy is ‘dishonest behaviour’ that ‘undermines citizens’ confidence in state institutions and damages the legitimacy of elections’ (Golos 2016).

The practice has parallels in democracies, too, however. Insofar as the goal of using parovozy is to capitalise on the name recognition and support for a particular, well-known individual for the benefit of others within the same political party, the practice has commonalities with ‘coattail’ effects, which have been studied, for example, in the context of US politics. As Moraski (2017: 576) observes, ‘the logic of the coattail model is based on the contention that voters incorporate well-defined and more cognitively accessible attitudes towards known candidates into their attitudes about political figures whom they know less about’. In the context of party-list PR elections, the coattails run from particular candidates to support for the political party as a whole, since voters cannot vote specifically for individual politicians, but can see the party list and vote for a party accordingly.

The term parovoz has a secondary meaning, which is used less frequently. Here it is used to refer to a particular legislative bill under consideration in the State Duma. Specifically, such bills have amendments made to them during legislative passage, but these changes are not conceptually related to the particular parovoz bill as originally conceived. The main bill acts as a vehicle (‘locomotive’), which is used to carry these amendments – referred to as vagonchiki – into law.

References

Antonov, K. 2020. ‘“Zhirinovsky vsegda idet pervym”: Lider LDPR vydvinulsia na vybory v dumu Kazani’, Kommersant’’, 22 July, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4425529

Golos. 2016. ‘Zaiavlenie o praktike vkliucheniia v partiinye spiski kandidatov lits, ne sobiraiushchikhsia stanovit’sia deputatami’, 29 July, https://www.golosinfo.org/articles/103411

Hutcheson, D. 2018. Parliamentary elections in Russia: A quarter-century of multiparty politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Moraski, B. 2017. ‘Reverse coattail effects in undemocratic elections: an analysis of Russian locomotives’, Democratization 24(4): 575-93

Reuter, O. 2017. The origins of dominant parties: Building authoritarian institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

Satarov, G. 2007. ‘Stsenarii no. 3: “Parovoz” partii i garant budushchego Putina-biznesmena’, The New Times, 8 October, https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/9313/

Tkacheva, O. 2009. ‘Governors as poster-candidates in Russia’s legislative elections, 2003-2008’, working paper, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/polisci-cpw/wp-content/uploads/sites/223/2015/02/olesyatkacheva-september_20.pdf