In the upcoming Russian parliamentary elections from September 18-20, governors will be the top candidate in 45 of the ruling United Russia party’s 57 regional rosters (80%).
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who is also considered the governor of the Russian capital, ranks second on the five-candidate federal party roster. Adding other governors running in second place brings the total number of such officials featured at the top of United Russia’s regional and federal rosters to 55. Since 2016, the number of governors heading the party’s rosters has risen sharply: from 19 in that year, to 49 in 2021 and now 55.
This growing reliance is telling. Regional leaders are not merely electoral “coattails” or “locomotives”; they also bear personal responsibility for results in their regions. Voting for United Russia can thus increasingly be seen as a referendum on governors’ approval, shifting accountability for the party’s performance onto their shoulders, and potentially becoming a major pain in their necks. For the party, it’s a useful corrective since it both keeps political elites in step and devolves any electoral uncertainty onto other officials.
Governors are well aware that they will be judged less by the economic performance of their regions — especially as their freedom to make essential decisions and attract funds is shrinking — than by their ability to maintain control over their territories. The clearest metric is pro-regime votes, including United Russia, and the absence of protests and unauthorized gatherings during the campaign.
At the same time, governors have limited impact on strategic campaign decisions. Major agreements and political bargaining — including the distribution of electoral districts among the five permitted parliamentary parties, United Russia, the KPRF or communists, LDPR, A Just Russia–For Truth, and New People — are arranged by the Presidential Administration, as are decisions on cancelling party and candidate registrations. Decisions on the rosters and candidates for the liberal Yabloko party and the KPRF are cases in point.
Most campaign funds are also beyond governors’ control, with rare exceptions in a handful of wealthier regions, such as Moscow, Tatarstan, Chechnya, and Sverdlovsk Oblast. Yet when it comes to electoral tactics, governors’ hands are largely untied. What arsenal do they have within this restricted space?
The first and most important instrument is the so-called administrative turnout — a bundle of measures aimed at pressuring, or directly compelling, people dependent on regional and municipal authorities or business management to turn out and vote for the ruling party. The key point is that some people have grown accustomed to obeying without even keeping a “fig sign in their pocket”, a Russian expression for concealed dissent, while others are surveilled by their immediate supervisors. The latter are personally responsible for delivering results and may risk their benefits or even their positions.
Governors chair closed meetings with municipal authorities — whose autonomy has severely shrunk since 2021 — along with senior managers of state-owned companies, military officers, and proxy civic organizations, to repeatedly assess their “vote buckets”: how many people each entity can bring to the polls and induce to vote for the ruling party.
Similar signals are transmitted from the top down through multiple administrative routes, including companies, the military, and ministerial hierarchies. “Administrative turnout” operates across overlapping levels, so an average voter receives the same signals from several directions, with each node embedded in an interconnected chain. As a result, few groups remain outside these circles — mainly small and medium-sized businesses, young people outside the education system, housewives, and some pensioners.
The second instrument may be defined as positive attribution: any positive change, new infrastructure, social facility, or beneficial decision in a region is attributed to the authorities and, ultimately, to United Russia. With governors heading the party rosters, possible gaps in this chain are bridged, and the campaign fuses into a eulogy for the authorities. Governors can, for instance, allocate bonuses to teachers at the beginning of the school year, or one-time payments to large professional or demographic groups. Such funding is presented as the generosity of the authorities and United Russia, whose candidates advocate for or bargain for these benefits. Virtually any such event makes prime-time news, as most regional media are loyal to the authorities.
The third major instrument is preferential arrangements for United Russia in terms of access to voters, media coverage, convenient venues, and political advertising. While officially allocated election time is distributed evenly among parties on the same TV channels and media outlets, additional opportunities — particularly news and reports — are available primarily to United Russia, whose candidates are often incumbents, directors, or officials, not to mention governors.
So-called black technologies, such as electoral carousels and direct vote buying, have become much less popular due to their limited efficiency and greater risk of detection and media exposure. Public scandals indicate to Moscow that a governor cannot control the territory and may result in punishment.
Yet, when all other instruments prove insufficient, there has always been a Plan B: falsifying the results through ballot stuffing, manually or electronically, using the votes of those who usually do not turn out — the same polling station commissions have often worked in their districts for years and know their voters — or by reallocating votes among parties during the count. For example, some estimates suggest that electoral manipulation may have significantly inflated Putin’s vote total in the 2024 presidential election. Not without reason, election observation is becoming increasingly performative and hollow.
Finally, the competitive nature of Russian elections has shifted from a contest among parties and candidates to competition between regional and municipal administrative machines at governors’ disposal. The current elections will thus show less support for United Russia than the ability of governors — and the administrative machine as a whole — to mobilize voters in the party’s favor and maintain control over their territories.
The author is an expert in Russian politics and governance. CEPA has withheld the writer’s name in recognition of possible retribution by the Russian regime.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
