Abstract
This article uses the data of the 2002 national census and a comprehensive dataset of the December 2003–March 2008 regional legislative elections in Russia to assess the levels of the representation of ethnic Muslims in the regional legislative assemblies. The study reveals that the overall pattern of the representation of ethnic Muslims in Russia's regional legislative assemblies is not monotonous. Ethnic Muslims are significantly overrepresented in those republics where they are ‘titular’ nationalities; they tend to be underrepresented in a group of regions with significant ethnic Muslim minorities; but as their share in the overall population goes down, the picture becomes more balanced, so that it would be fair to say that small Muslim minorities are quite well represented. The article explains the observed patterns with reference to the logic of non-politicization of cleavages shared by all types of regions. For the ruling elites of Muslim-majority republics, the preferred mode of operation is to keep the overrepresentation of Muslims as a characteristic of all political groups who can realistically claim access to power. For the predominantly Russian elites of regions with significant ethnic Muslim minorities, the non-politicization of cleavages is a way to make electoral appeals to wider general population. In the regions with small ethnic Muslim minorities, their entry into political arenas is conditional on individual or group alliances with locally dominant elite groups, without any articulation of ethnicity/religion cleavages whatsoever.
Introduction
The political standing of any societal group depends heavily on the levels of representation attained by this group in the existing bodies of government. While the theory of mirror representation may not catch all the normative desiderata of liberal democracy, on the one hand, and may be misleading as a guide for an empirical assessment of democratic institutions, on the other hand (Burdess and O'Toole, 2004; Prewitt & Eulau, 1969), it is nevertheless clear that for the voice of a group to be heard, adequate representation is highly desirable. At the same time, under-representation, if at a significant scale, may cause political frustration, alienation, and reliance upon non-systemic ways of political advocacy (Hewitt, 1981). The purpose of this article is to empirically assess the level of correspondence between the shares of ethnic Muslims in the overall population of Russia's regions and their salience in regional electoral politics, as manifested in elections to regional legislative assemblies. In fact, after direct gubernatorial elections were abolished in 2005 (Goode, 2007), legislative assemblies remained the only elected region-level office in Russia, and their political significance increased to an extent after gubernatorial elections were replaced with governors' appointment by the president of Russia pending on confirmation by a majority vote in the assembly. Governors are by far the most important players in Russia's regional politics. Yet the powers of the assemblies are not symbolic in such policy domains as general legislation, sub-national taxation, and budgeting (Golosov, 2004). Hence it is for a good reason that assembly seats are highly valued by Russia's regional elites, as manifested by the process of ‘elite colonization’ of the assemblies that started as early as in the first half of the 1990s (Golosov, 1997; Slider, 1996). Correspondingly, the symbolic and practical implications of group representation in these bodies are significant.
The analysis consists of three sections. In the first section, I investigate the proportions made by ethnic Muslims in the overall population of the Russian Federation and in its individual regions. By ethnic Muslims, I understand populations belonging to those ethnic groups who are Muslim by tradition. No claim is made that ethnicity automatically entails religious commitments. At the same time, I find it apparent that whatever the current levels of religious activity are, the cultural background creates a certain level of communality among ethnic Muslims, and may be conducive to specific organizational and ideological patterns of political activity. In the second section, I assess the levels of political representation of ethnic Muslims in regional legislative assemblies, for which end basic factual information about these institutions is provided, and an empirical assessment is made. In the third section, I deepen my inquiry by bringing into the picture the role of individual political parties as agencies of ethnic Muslims' representation in Russia, and provide an overall explanatory model. The methodological tools and sources used for solving these tasks are characterized in the corresponding sections.
How many ethnic Muslims are there in the regions of Russia?
Despite the obvious simplicity of the question, it poses an empirical problem. Even the assessments of the share of ethnic Muslims in contemporary Russia's population run wide from about 10 percent to nearly 20 percent. In fact, the published results of the 2002 national census provide all the necessary and sufficient raw data, but some additional effort to aggregate them at the regional level is in order, which I do in this section of the article. This, in turn, requires some elementary factual information about how ethnicity was dealt with by the organizers of the 2002 census.
In all censuses previously held in the Soviet Union, the respondents had to choose their nationality from lists provided by the interviewers (Karklins, 1980; Taagepera, 1971). These lists varied quite significantly from one census to another, depending on the sometimes erratic dynamics of Soviet nationality politics and of the academy that followed these twists. In 2002, for the first time, the respondents were free to decide how to identify their ethnicity, and whether to reveal it at all (Heleniak, 2003). In fact, slightly more than 1 percent of all respondents chose not to report their nationality. A very small portion of the respondents, 0.03 percent, did report it, but the nationalities reported by them were very rare, unusual, or simply imagined, such as Elves or Hobbits. Yet for as many as 98.9 percent of the respondents, reporting their ethnicity was not problematic, and their reported identifications fit into 142 categories identified by census organizers. The breakdown of the overall population by these categories was published both for the country as a whole and for individual regions. By regions, I conventionally understand the 89 sub-national units, officially referred to as ‘federation subjects’, that existed in Russia in 2002: 21 republics, 6 territories, 49 provinces, 2 federal cities, 1 autonomous province, and 10 autonomous districts. Of them, the republics, the autonomous province, and the autonomous districts were the residua of the Soviet-time nationality politics, for they had been created as homelands for their ‘titular nationalities’, while other units were simply territorial (Hazard, 1971). According to the 1993 Constitution of Russia, all regions are equal in their standing vis-à-vis the Federation, even though all but one autonomous districts were parts of larger regions, territories or provinces. This constitutional ambiguity was solved in different ways at different phases of Russia's political development (Hanson, 2006).
To fulfill the goal of my empirical inquiry, it was essential to differentiate the set of 142 nationalities into two broader analytical categories, Muslims and non-Muslims. Upon investigating each of the ethnic groups, I found this task generally unproblematic, because the empirical boundary between these categories is not blurred to any significant extent. While it is true that small Muslim minorities exist among traditionally non-Muslim ethnic groups (such as the Laz among Georgians), and vice versa (such as Kryashens among Tatars), such minorities are small. This allowed me to characterize quite unambiguously 43 groups as ethnic Muslim (listed below), and 99 as non-Muslim.
The first finding revealed by my empirical inquiry was that the share of ethnic Muslims in the overall population of Russia is often overestimated. According to the 2002 national census, they constituted 9.93 percent of the population. Table 1 lists the ethnic Muslim groups of Russia in the descending order of their numeric sizes. An additional piece of information provided in the table refers to the shares of ethnic Muslim populations residing in their ethnic homelands, republics. This information is useful for the assessment of the territorial dispersion of ethnic Muslins, as well as of some political aspects to be discussed below. Twelve groups (Crimean Tatars, Dunguns, Karakalpaks, Khemshils, Meskhetin Turks, Middle-Asian Arabs, Middle-Asian Gipsies, Persians, Shapsugs, Talysh, Tats, Uyghurs), each of them constituting less then 0.01 percent of the overall population, are joined together under the rubric of Others. It is important to note that for all other calculations reported in this study, they were counted separately. The republic of Dagestan is officially a homeland for 10 groups (Aguls, Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Laks, Lezghins, Nogai, Rutuls, Tabasarans, and Tsakhurs), none of which constituting a majority. Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkesia are homelands for two groups each, Balkarians and Kabardinians, and Cirkassians and Karachai, respectively. Thus of the 31 groups for which the data are given in the table, 19 do have their ethnic homelands in the Russian Federation, even though some of them are shared, while the remaining 12, with the only exception of Abazins, have their majorities residing in foreign countries. This means that the Soviet-time nationality politics were quite efficient in supplying every significant ethnic Muslim group with its own ‘statehood’.
The ethnic Muslim population of Russia.
The ethnic Muslim population of Russia.
Source: calculated by the author from the official 2002 census data, http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=17, accessed in January through 7 December 2011.
As follows from the data, the vast majority of ethnic Muslim populations of Russia reside mostly in those regions where they are ‘titular nationalities’. The most salient exception is, of course, provided by Tatars. While Tatars are by far the largest ethnic Muslim group in Russia, almost two thirds of them live outside of their ethnic homeland, Tatarstan. Then it is not surprising that Tatars constitute the largest ethnic Muslim minorities in the vas majority of Russia's regions. Yet it is also important to note that a large part of Tatars live in a neighboring republic, Bashkortostan. The data on the ethnic compositions of the Russian regions are provided in Table 2. The regions are listed in the descending order of the percentage shares of their ethnic Muslim populations. Individual ethnic groups are listed only if they constitute more than 1 percent of the overall population. However, the largest ethnic Muslim minorities are listed irrespective of their relative size. The words ‘autonomous district’ are abbreviated to AD, and ‘autonomous province’, to AP.
Ethnic Muslims in the populations of Russia's regions.
Source: calculated by the author from the official 2002 census data, http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=17, accessed in January through 7 December 2011.
As follows from the table, in only seven regions of Russia ethnic Muslims constitute outright majorities, running from 53.99 percent in Tatarstan to 98.13 percent in Ingushetia. All these regions are republics created as homelands for ethnic Muslim groups. Of these regions, Russians are in plurality only in Bashkortostan where the ‘titular’ Muslim nationality is almost matched by Tatars. Then follows a group of eight regions where ethnic Muslims form significant pluralities, over than 10 percent. Only one of them, Adygeya, is a republic, which makes it closer to the first cluster of regions. There, the ‘titular’ nationality yields in size to Russians. In the remaining regions of this category, the largest ethnic Muslim groups are Tatars or, in Astrakhan province, Kazakhs. Bashkirs and Azerbaijani are also visibly present. In twelve regions, ethnic Muslims form from 5 to 10 percent of the population. In the remaining 62 regions, the shares of ethnic Muslim populations are smaller than 5 percent, which makes them small minorities.
In the vast majority of regions, with an exception of several republics, information about the ethnicity of the elected deputies, not to say about all candidates running in elections, is neither collected nor publicly reported. Thus the census-like data about the ethnic compositions of regional legislative assemblies are not available. At the same time, information about ethnicity can be easily inferred from an essential piece of information that is naturally reported as a part of the available electoral statistics, the names of candidates and elected deputies. The official way of reporting names in Russia is to include three components, the first name, the patronymic name, and the last (family) name. In theory, candidates may abstain from reporting their patronymics, but in practice, very few choose to do that. Fortunately from the point of view of this research, the impact of Islam on the personal names of Russian citizens is visible enough to make ethnic Muslims easily distinguishable from those who are, in their collective backgrounds, Christians (as the majority of Russia's nationalities), Buddhists (as Buryats or Kalmyks), or Jews. There are only two significant exceptions: Ossetians, who cannot be easily distinguished by their names from the surrounding Islamic groups, and Altai, who are mostly Christian, yet their names are often similar to the names of Kazakhs who are significantly present in their ‘titular’ region, Altai Republic. This made me exclude two regions, North Ossetia and Altai Republic, from further inquiry.
The practical criterion for including individual candidates into the category of ethnic Muslims was thus: I included only those for whom at least two of the three components of the name indicated ethnic Muslim origins. For instance, a person with a Russian family name but Muslim first and patronymic names, a combination especially widespread among women candidates, was included, but if only the patronymic name was Muslim, she was discounted. Of course, this method obviously entails individual-level mistakes. To compensate for that, I used a very large database of candidates who ran in all Russia's regional legislative elections from December 2003 to March 2008. In addition to North Ossetia and Altai Republic, the database does not include the data for only three regions that have not held any regional elections throughout the period: Kemerovo province, Komi-Permyak and Evenki autonomous districts. These autonomous districts were in fact merged with larger territories during the period under observation. I also excluded from this analysis the upper chambers of regional legislative assemblies. Such chambers existed in few regions and normally lacked political significance. For the remaining 84 regions, the study embraced 95 elections. The overall number of candidates coded for ethnic Muslim origins was 23,902. Of them, 3196 (13.37 percent) were identified as ethnic Muslims, and 20,706, as others. Of course, this method does not allow to establish ethnicity within these wide categories (it does not differentiate between Tatars and Bashkirs, or between Russians and Yakuts), but for drawing the lines between the categories, it is quite efficient, and this suffices for the purposes of this study.
The reason for taking December 2003 as a starting point for my inquiry was institutional. Starting with that time, the federal law made it imperative for the regions to elect no less than a half of their assembly deputies by a system of proportional representation. This makes the whole set of cases internally homogeneous, and the cases themselves, comparable (Golosov, 2006), which will have especially important consequences for the next section of this analysis. At this point, however, certain clarifications regarding the institutional framework of the observed elections are in order. Each of the 95 elections included a proportional component, and ten of them were held exclusively by proportional formulas. Sverdlovsk province uses a system of staggered elections, with a half of its assembly being elected each two years. I counted each of these elections separately. The average size of the elected assembly was 45.08, while the average size of the proportional part was slightly more than a half of that, 24.18. To understand this, it is important to take into account that mixed-system assemblies tended to be larger than those elected by pure proportional systems.
Proportional elections were held exclusively in region-wide districts. The set of legally eligible participants in these elections was restricted to nationally registered political parties and (up to the fall of 2005) to electoral blocs created by them. These entities were entitled to nominate their lists of candidates for elections. The lists, with few exceptions, were closed, not providing for a choice among individual candidates. In order to achieve representation, parties were normally required to cross legal thresholds. Of the 95 elections under observation, 10 percent thresholds were in 2, 8 percent in 1, 7 percent in 52, 6 percent in 2, 5 percent in 32, 4 percent in 3, 3 percent in 1, and two regions did not set such thresholds. Most of these thresholds were, as follows from the numbers, prohibitively high. The non-proportional sections of regional legislative elections were shaped in a variety of ways, including majority, single-member plurality, and multi-member plurality systems, and single non-transferable vote. These differences were not very consequential from the point of view of this study. Yet it is important to mention that non-proportional (district) elections remained the only outlet for independent candidacy, officially referred to as ‘self-nomination’, in Russia's regional electoral arenas.
The political atmosphere in which these elections were held was not very favorable for political pluralism. Throughout the period under observation, Russia shifted from what can be called a manipulative ‘managed democracy’ (Colton & McFaul, 2003) to electoral authoritarianism (Golosov, 2011), with the national pro-government party, United Russia, gradually achieving effective political monopoly in the country. This shift was accompanied by a move toward a greater political centralization, with United Russia being employed as one of its principal tools (Konitzer & Wegren, 2006). The average share of seats taken by United Russia in 32 elections from December 2003 to May 2005 was 43.40 percent, in 35 elections from October 2005 to April 2007, 60.33 percent, and in 19 elections in December 2007 and March 2008, it achieved 74.20 percent. The consequences for ethnic Muslim representation will be discussed at some length in the following section. Already at this point, however, the role of United Russia is noteworthy simply because this party emerges as the principle vehicle for any kind of political representation in Russia.
Table 3 reports factual information about the levels of representation attained by ethnic Muslims in the December 2003–March 2008 regional legislative elections. The regions are arranged in the descending order of the percentage shares of their ethnic Muslim populations, as reported in Table 2. The table also reports the percentage shares of ethnic Muslim deputies elected to the assemblies, and identifies the ways in which these deputies were nominated for elections (by a political party, an electoral bloc, or as independents). The dates of elections are provided to make a dynamic assessment possible.
The representation of ethic Muslims in Russia's regional legislative assemblies.
The representation of ethic Muslims in Russia's regional legislative assemblies.
Source: calculated by the author from the Russian Electoral Statistics Database, http://db.irena.org.ru/, accessed in January through 7 December 2011.
The data presented in the table suggest a non-monotonous pattern of ethnic Muslim representation in Russia. In those regions where they form majorities of population, ethnic Muslims are almost invariably overrepresented. Yet there is some differentiation within this category of regions. In those republics where the ethnic Muslims overwhelmingly exceed other ethnic groups, the extent of their overrepresentation is modest, and in Dagestan, they are even slightly underrepresented. Ethnic Muslims' overrepresentation becomes much more visible in the four republics where their shares in the population vary between 53.99 and 70.50 percent, and its reaches its apex in the only ethnic Muslim republic where the ‘titular’ nation yields plurality to Russians, Adygeya. In Adygeya, indeed, the difference between the percentage shares of ethnic Muslims in the assembly and the populations is glaring 19.29 percent. Then follows a long sequence of regions where ethnic Muslims are significant minorities in the overall population, from 25.59 percent in Astrakhan province to 6.80 percent in Perm territory, and where ethnic Muslims are invariably underrepresented. This tendency breaks drastically at Omsk province, with its 6.75 percent of ethnic Muslims in the population and 9.09 percent, in the assembly. As the share of ethnic Muslims in the population becomes still smaller, the pattern becomes erratic, combining the cases of strong overrepresentation (such as in Sverdlovsk and Sakhalin provinces) with those of severe under-representation (such as in Moscow).
A more rigorous way to assess the pattern is to run a bivariate analysis of relationship between ethnic Muslims' shares in the population and in the assemblies. To do that, I slightly modified the data to avoid giving excessive weight to those regions that held more than one elections during the period under observation. Namely, I simply calculated average shares of assembly seats won by ethnic Muslim candidates in such regions, which left me with 84 observations overall. The correlation between the two variables on the whole set of cases proved to be very strong, 0.98 (here and below, Pearson's r). However, upon the removal of top eight regions where ethnic Muslims are overrepresented (n = 76), the correlation falls to 0.61, and after all regions where ethnic Muslims form more than 5 percent of the population are removed (n = 57), Pearson's r becomes small and statistically insignificant, 0.20.
As follows from the table, the principle vehicle of ethnic Muslim representation in the regions of Russia is indeed the ‘party of power’, United Russia. This can be proven by using a simple method of counting the numbers of nomination categories in Table 3. Of the 106 categories, United Russia provides 48, self-nomination, 21, and the Communist party of the Russian Federation, 12. None of the remaining parties appears on the set more than thrice, including the third nationally important party, the Liberal Democratic Party of the Russian Federation. Of course, at this point, it would be premature to make any inference regarding the causes for United Russia's apparent championship in providing ethnic Muslims with assembly seats. It well might be that the reason is simply the party's domination in the general electorate.
One explanation of why ethnic Muslims are overrepresented in some regions and underrepresented in others, as observed above, is easily at hand, general and parsimonious, but not very helpful. To put it briefly, territorially dispersed minorities tend to be underrepresented under any electoral system. This would be the case with Russians in Ingushetia and Chechnya, and with ethnic Muslims in some of the regions of central Russia. But this does not explain neither the overrepresentation of ethnic Muslims in Adygeya, on the one hand, and in Bryansk province, on the other hand, nor their under-representation in Orenburg province.
The second theory, also easily available at the scholarly marketplace, would be to relate the overrepresentation of ethnic Muslims to their status of ‘titular nationalities’ in some of the republics. One of the goals of Leninist nationality politics was to create local elites capable of implementing the policies of the Communist party in the Muslim-majority regions (Zaslavsky, 1993: 29–42). This goal was generally achieved. Moreover, when the Communist party rule collapsed, thus created elites have managed to keep and consolidate their powers, which allows some observers to estimate some of the republics as ‘ethnocracies’ (Kahn, 2002). Ethnicity is an important component of the ‘political machines’ built by those elites in order to hold their grasp on the electorate (Hale, 2003). This theory seems to be correct in that it convincingly explains the gap between the top nine regions on Table 3, yet the details are missing. Why is the overrepresentation of ethnic Muslims in Karachevo-Cherkesia and Adygeya so strong in comparison to Kabardino-Balkaria and Bashkortostan?
The third theory could be built on the basis of preliminary findings reported in the previous section of this article. If the role of United Russia in securing the representation of ethnic Muslims is so well pronounced, then it could be that this party, by building a sort of alliance with the Muslim communities of Russia, provides them with shortcuts to representation. Other policy-based explanations can be also suggested. But for these explanations to be correct or not, they have to be weighted against the empirical evidence. The only way to analytically isolate United Russia's role in providing ethnic Muslims' representation from its generally superior electoral performance is, of course, to look more closely not at the actual level of representation, but rather at the potential for ethnic Muslim representation provided by different parties.
The necessary and sufficient data for such analysis were provided by including into my study not only the elected deputies, but also all candidates running in regional legislative elections. Yet to substantiate the analysis, a brief overview of Russia's party system during the period under observation is in order. The set of parties available for electoral participation in Russia was established by the Law on political parties, according to which to be officially registered, an organization had to fulfill a number of requirements to its membership and territorial spread. These requirements grew stronger over time, as a result of which the overall number of parties declined from 46 in 2003 to 15 in 2007, and the overall shape of the party system changed from the multiparty format to a hierarchy centered around the ‘party of power’ (Gel'man, 2008). The most sustainable and omnipresent actors throughout the period were, in addition to United Russia (UR), the Communist party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), a personalistic vehicle of Vladimir Zhirinovsky who often displayed statist and sometimes, nationalist inclinations. Three parties that were also nationalist but perhaps with a stronger emphasis on the ethno-nationalist outlook were Motherland, the Patriots of Russia (PR), and People's Will (PW), later renamed as People's Union (PU). The moderate left was represented by the Agrarian Party of Russia (APR), the Russian Party of Life (RPL), Russian Pensioners' Party (RPP), the People's Party of the Russian Federation (PPRF), and the Party of Russia's Rebirth (PRR). In 2006, Motherland, RPL and RPP merged to form a new pro-government left-wing party, A Just Russia (AJR). The pro-democracy segment of Russia's political spectrum was represented by the Union of Right Forces (URF) and Yabloko. Before the fall of 2005, an important role in regional electoral arenas was played by electoral blocs, many of which were formally established by minor national parties yet in fact sought to mobilize the local sentiment of the electorate (Golosov, 2006). The Law on political parties explicitly prohibits religious identities as bases for forming political parties. However, one minor party, the True Patriots of Russia (TPR), did in fact seek the support of ethnic Muslims in the 2003 national legislative elections, and a continued to exist for some time in 2004.
Table 4 uses as the empirical indicator of ethnic Muslims' representation the percentage shares of ethnic Muslim candidates on the lists of political parties. First, I report averages for all parties. For three parties that participated in regional legislative elections systematically, UR, LDPR, and CPRF, the percentages are reported separately. All other parties are broken into two categories, those on whose lists ethnic Muslins were overrepresented relative to the reported average for the given region, and those on whose lists they were underrepresented. Self-nomination is disregarded because my primary interest at this point is in the relationships between ethnic Muslim populations and organized political actors.
Ethnic Muslims on the lists of political parties in regional legislative elections.
Ethnic Muslims on the lists of political parties in regional legislative elections.
Source: calculated by the author from the Russian Electoral Statistics Database, http://db.irena.org.ru/, accessed in January through 7 December 2011.
With the data at hand, it is possible to analyze the patterns of ethnic Muslim representation more closely. First, it becomes clear that while United Russia does indeed provide for their representation (on the average, the share of ethnic Muslims on its lists is 10.07), two other major parties, the Communists and the LDPR, are not crucially different in this respect (the respective percentage shares are 10.07 and 9.01). In the Muslim-majority republics of North Caucasus, the ‘titular’ population tends to be overrepresented on the lists of all major parties. In Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the LDPR is an exception, yet in these regions the party's electoral appeal is limited, and it seems that it gains nothing by giving more space on its lists to the non-Muslim populations. Thus in general, it would be fair to say that the political elites of the republics, be it United Russia or opposition parties, are not divided along the line of securing primary representation for ethnic Muslims. Yet at the same time, all major parties give space to the non-Muslim minorities too.
One exception from this generally uniform picture is Karachevo-Cherkesia, the only republic where elections were contested by the True Patriots of Russia, the party of a primarily Muslim voting base. The TPR nominated a list that was entirely Muslim by composition, and it crossed the 5 percent threshold, thus achieving representation. This partly explains the overall overrepresentation of ethnic Muslims in the parliament of the republic, given that United Russia nominated a list that almost mirrored the actual ethnic balance in the republic. It has to be noticed that the electoral assault of the TPR was viewed extremely unfavorably not only by the authorities of the republic but also by the Kremlin, and soon after these elections the party was deprived of its official status and ceased to exist.
Of course, Adygeya is exceptional in that while being a republic, it has Russians as a large plurality of its population. Since, however, the incentives to keep the ‘titular’ population overrepresented remain the same as in other republics, this opens way to politicizing the issues of ethnic representation. In the 2006 elections in Adygeya, the overrepresentation of ethnic Muslims on the list of United Russia was indeed striking, yet the Communists and another regionally important party, the APR, also nominated lists that overrepresented them. The cause of providing ethnic non-Muslims with adequate representation was taken by a minor party that allied itself with the Union of Slavs of Adyageya, the Russian United Industrial Party. The party took 12.92 percent of party list vote, which brought its leaders to the assembly. True, the combined vote for United Russia, the Communists, and the Agrarians was massive enough to leave ethnic Muslims strongly overrepresented. Yet the unexpected entry of the Russian United Industrial Party into the electoral arena of the republic caused significant turmoil and anger among the region's predominantly Adygeyan political elites, as testified by the fact that the president of Adygeya lost his power amidst the turmoil.
The experiences of Karachaevo-Cherkesia and Adygeya, however different, jointly point to an important communality in the political lives of the republics with ethnic Muslim ‘titular’ populations. The preferred mode of operation for their ethnocratic elites is to keep political dominance by securing the overrepresentation of ethic Muslims in all electorally important parties without placing the related issues high on the agenda of regional elections. Any attempts to elevate these issues, be it in the direction of mobilizing the Muslim vote (as in Karachaevo-Cherkesia) or in the direction of non-Muslim interest advocacy (as in Adygeya), are viewed as undesirable.
As I have already observed in the previous section of this analysis, an entirely different pattern of ethnic Muslim under-representation can be found in a relatively large group of regions with significant ethnic Muslim populations that are not republics. Now it becomes clear that in these regions, major parties rarely sought to increase its electoral appeal by mobilizing the ethnic Muslim vote. In the regions with largest ethnic Muslim minorities, Astrakhan and Orenburg provinces and Khanty-Mansi autonomous district, ethnic Muslims were actually underrepresented on the lists of all parties, the Communist party in Orenburg standing as the only (but not very salient) exception. In Ulyanovsk and Tyumen provinces, there were lists with very significant shares of ethnic Muslim candidates, such as the URF list in Ulyanovsk (2003) and the Democratic Party of Russia list in Tyumen. Yet these lists failed to cross the established thresholds of representation, and no such attempts can be found in regions with smaller shares of ethnic Muslims within this category. However, as the share of ethnic Muslims in the general population goes down, the major parties – primarily, United Russia and the CPRF, but sometimes even the LDPR, as in Udmurtia, – start to place certain numbers of ethnic Muslims on their lists. As demonstrated above, this gradually reverses the pattern of ethnic Muslim under-representation.
At the first glance, such dynamics may seem idiosyncratic. It seems unclear why important political parties disregard the possibility of mobilizing the Muslim vote in those regions where Muslims are numerous enough to bring a significant bonus, and start to appeal to them only they decrease in numbers. I believe that this pattern is, in fact, well consistent with the general logic of proportional representation. Appeals to minorities pay off to major parties only if by making such appeals, they do not risk to limit their attractiveness for the general population. Yet with relatively large minorities, such risks are greater than with relatively small ones simply because of the differentiated salience of ethnic and cultural divisions. In other words, party elites are likely to appeal to minorities only if the cleavages between these minorities and majorities are not likely to be politicized. But they are more likely to be politicized if the minority is relatively large.
Hence a very miscellaneous picture of ethnic Muslim representation in the regions where there are few ethnic Muslims. In these regions, access to representation depends entirely on the ability of ethnic Muslim politicians to enter locally prominent political parties, primarily United Russia. Such alliances are made mostly on individual bases, but this does not exclude the whole groups of ethnic Muslim politicians to be included, as, for instance, with the Pensioners' Party in Ivanovo province (2005). But it is clear that under such conditions, what really matters in terms of representation is placement on the list of United Russia. Hence its prominence in delivering representation to Russia's ethnic Muslims.
This analysis reveals that the overall pattern of the representation of ethnic Muslims in Russia's regional legislative assemblies is not monotonous. Ethnic Muslims are significantly overrepresented in those republics where they are ‘titular’ nationalities; they tend to be underrepresented in a group of regions with significant ethnic Muslim minorities; but as their share in the overall population goes down, the picture becomes more balanced, so that it would be fair to say that small Muslim minorities are quite well represented. Despite this apparent variation, the underlying logic is the same for all types of regions, and if put most briefly, this is the logic of non-politicization of cleavages. For the ruling elites of Muslim-majority republics, the preferred mode of operation is to keep the overrepresentation of Muslims as a characteristic of all political groups who can realistically claim access to power. For the predominantly Russian elites of regions with significant ethnic Muslim minorities, the non-politicization of cleavages is a way to make electoral appeals to wider general population. In the regions with small ethnic Muslim minorities, their entry into political arenas is conditional on individual or group alliances with locally dominant elite groups, without any articulation of ethnicity/religion cleavages whatsoever.
Then it is not surprising that after the True Patriots of Russia perished, no political party made an attempt to enter the theoretically promising electoral niche of mobilizing the ethnic Muslim vote. Quite the reverse is true, the cleavage is progressively downplayed in the rhetoric of all parties. It is striking to note that even those parties that are generally considered as Russian nationalist, such as the LDPR or Motherland, in some regions recruited significant numbers of ethnic Muslims on their lists.
The problem is that this situation may be not sustainable in the long run. In fact, one of the aspects of the growing electoral authoritarianism in Russia is that it has succeeded in eliminating almost all issue content from the arena of electoral politics. The issues of ethnicity are not exceptional in this respect. The same applies to the issues of class, fundamental economic policies and the like. If, however, the system of electoral authoritarianism gives way to a more competitive model of politics, all currently suppressed issues will resurface overnight. If this is to happen, then we already know which regions are likely to be in trouble with the representation of ethnic Muslims: first, those republics where they are overrepresented (which applies to Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and especially Adygeya); and second, those regions where they are underrepresented (which applies primarily to Asdtrakhan, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, and Tyumen provinces).
Acknowledgments
This research has been made possible by a United States Institute of Peace Grant (USIP-017-06S), and greatly assisted by the efficient administration of research provided by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (Washington, DC). Much of the empirical work has been conducted by the co-recipient of the USIP grant, Iulia Shevchenko. While being greatly indebted to these organizations and individuals, I have to stress that they carry no responsibility for the views expressed. All errors of fact and interpretation are also entirely mine.