The FPC held a breakfast seminar on 8 April 2005 with Andrei Kunov and Alexei Sitnikov, Senior Researchers of the Open Economy Institute, Moscow, to assess the future of parliamentary democracy in Russia.

After almost a year since the last State Duma election and Vladimir Putin's re-election, few people remember how many voters supported the party of power - United Russia - and the large gap between Putin and the runner-up, communist Nikolai Kharitonov. Opposition calls for a recount of the Duma election went nowhere, and many questions that came up as a result of the last electoral cycle remain unanswered.

Yet many of these questions are crucial for understanding the present and future of the Russian electoral landscape, and hence the future of the country's democratic development. The results of the research carried out by the Open Economy Institute track the flow of votes and electorate support among political parties between different electoral cycles, beginning in 1995. The authors argue that the Russian electorate is now far less predictable in its political preferences than in the beginning of modern Russian electoral history.

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