Jt. Ishiyama, RED VERSUS EXPERT - CANDIDATE RECRUITMENT AND COMMUNIST-PARTY ADAPTATION IN POST-SOVIET POLITICS, Party politics, 4(3), 1998, pp. 297-318
This paper focuses on the political evolution and behavior of the Comm
unist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) from 1991 to 1995. In par
ticular, it addresses two questions. What has the KPRF done to adjust
to new political circumstances' Was the 'strategy' successful and did
it explain KPRF electoral gains in the parliamentary elections of 1995
? The paper concentrates on one aspect of this adjustment process - co
mparing the KPRF's candidate recruitment behavior for the State Duma e
lections of 1993 and 1995. However rather than describe what the party
has done in terms of candidate recruitment, I derive a set of theoret
ical expectations from both the general literature on party behavior i
n the West and in Eastern Europe, and analyze the candidate recruitmen
t behavior of the KPRF as an empirical test of these expectations. Sec
ond, this paper assesses the extent to which the types of candidates t
he party recruited for the single-mandate districts in 1995 affected t
he probability of their winning election.