Grigorii V. Golosov, "Political Parties, Electoral Systems and Women's Representation in the Regional Legislative Assemblies of Russia, 1995-1998," Party Politics, 7 (January 2001), 45-68.

First Paragraph:
As in well-established liberal democracies, women in Russia tend to be under-represented within elected bodies (Buckley, 1992). The lower chamber of the Russian national legislature included 13.5, 9.8 and 7.9 percent of women in 1993, 1995 and 1999, respectively (Parlamentskaya Gazeta, 20 December 1999, pp. 1, 2). While women's representation is obviously declining over time, its level is not entirely different from the average share of women in the lower or single chambers in the majority of the world's democratic countries, 12 percent in 1997 (Jones, 1998: 4). This study examines factors influencing women's representation in the regional legislative assemblies of Russia. In the west, the analyses of subnational legislative politics have been instrumental in identifying such factors (Kirkpatrick, 1974; Diamond, 1977). Generally, the obstacles to women's representation have been explicated in terms of cultural norms or, more specifically, gender differences in political socialization and adult gender roles (Sapiro and Farah, 1980). Similarly designed studies in Russia are few, but they tend to reach similar conclusions (Temkina, 1997: 155-82). Yet another factor consistently found to be influential both in the west and in Russia is the strength of the women's movement (Darcy et al., 1994; Slater, 1995). The impact of demographic and socio-economic factors identified in cross-national research (Andersen, 1975; Hansen et al., 1976; Sapiro, 1983) has not received much scholarly attention in Russia.' While paying some attention to the socio-economic aspects of women's representation, this study is focused differently. Its goal isto examine the role of political institutions - political parties and electoral systems - in defining the levels of women's political representation in the regions of Russia.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: The descriptive characteristics of the variables employed in the analysis of 80 regional cases p. 51
Table 2: Multiple regression statistics (dependant variable is the percentage of female deputies in the assembly) p. 55
Table 3: Multiple regression statistics (dependant variable is the percentage of party nominees in the assembly) p. 55
Table 4: Party affiliation of elected deputies in 80 regions of Russia by gender p. 56
Table 5: Party affiliation of elected deputies (winners) in 13 regions of Russia by gender, 1995-8 p. 57
Table 6: Success of female candidates to 13 regional assemblies of Russia by party affiliation, 1995-8 p. 57
Table 7: Success of candidates to 13 regional assemblies of Russia by gender, 1995-8 p. 58
Table 8: Success of independent candidates to 13 regional assemblies of Russia by gender, 1995-8 p. 58
Table 9: Party affiliation of candidates to 13 regional assemblies of Russia by district magnitude, 1995-8 p. 59
Table 10: Party affiliation of elected deputies (winners) in 13 regions of Russia by district magnitude, 1995-8 p. 59

Last Paragraph:
Let us assume for a moment that the development of party politics in the regions of Russia will take the direction of the emergence of competitive, not monopolistic, and efficient, not extremely fragmented, party systems. This is, of course, a very perhaps excessively - optimistic view of the prospects for democracy in Russia's regions. Once this assumption is made, the bad news for women's representation is that it is likely to decrease. The good news is that a cure in the form of introducing proportional representation is at least theoretically available. In the end, it is possible to generalize that when treated as a potential democracy Russia displays no striking specificity in terms of political parties' and electoral systems' impact upon the political representation of women. Both factors can work as expected. What makes electoral systems irrelevant and political parties idiosyncratic is the extreme under-development of party politics in the country. As such, this under-development can be related to the authoritarian legacies still persistent in the contemporary Russian polity.