The investigators undertake a multidimensional study of the forthcoming electoral cycle in the Russian Federation. If the normal schedule is respected, then Russians are expected to elect a new State Duma in December 1999; in July 2000, they elect a president. The Russian electorate is the fourth largest in the world. If faces choices which are unusual in their complexity and importance, even in a transitional regime. Boris Yeltsin has been president of the country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The impending elections are most likely to result in the handing of state power to a new set of leaders and to the initation of a new period in the political development of the country and of the world region. The investigators plan to study the elections with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. They undertake a three-wave panel survey of the electorate, with two waves bracketing the parliamentary election and a third wave following the presidential election. The questionnaires build on earlier work by Colton, incorporate the full question module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which is based at the University of Michigan, and draw on qualitative work done by McFaul. This work proceeds in 1999-2000 out of the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. The surveys gather information about the full range of explanatory variables of interest to comparative students of electoral behavior and, of course, about factors embedded in the unique Russian and post-Soviet experience. A fourth survey is of the surviving members of a panel of respondents assembled for the study of the Russian elections of 1995-96. The survey work is complemented by focus groups and by elite tracking work managed by McFaul. The two investigators intend to coauthor a study of electoral behavior in 1999-2000, which is framed in the comparative literature and designed to produce scholarly articles on themes in the development of the Russian electorate. The data are available to CSES and the scholarly community.
