Drawing on research of more than a quarter-century of Russian elections, the paper It traces how the hyper-pluralist political system of the 1990s gave way to the electoral authoritarianism of the late Putin period, though concerted electoral engineering.  A particular focus is on the ‘toolkit’ of measures used to constrict competition and access to the ballot, to ensure favourable electoral outcomes for the Kremlin and its associates.  But the mechanism of Russian electoral success – extracting ever greater electoral gains from an ever-narrower base of public support, at the expense of systemic renewal – contains inherent dangers for the Kremlin, and may presage another epochal shift in the Russian political system.  The talk will focus on this and on the work on the subject that the author intends to carry out during a forthcoming fellowship at the ANU.

Prof. Derek Hutcheson is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Global Political Studies (GPS) at Malmö University, Sweden, and Vice-Dean of Malmö University's Faculty of Culture and Society (KS). He is visiting the Australian National University as a Visiting Fellow in July-September 2023, and has previously been a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and worked at University College Dublin (Ireland) and the University of Glasgow (UK). He has researched and published extensively on Russian politics, as well as the comparative study of electoral politics, transnational citizenship and electoral rights across Europe and elsewhere; and on local democracy in Scandinavia and Russia.