Abstract

The victory of the opposition parties in the elections to the Second State Duma (1995) was facilitated not only by objective factors, but also by the peculiarities of the electoral system in the Russian Federation. In this regard, the president and his entourage actively promote a strategy that provided for abandonment of the majority-proportional system and transition exclusively to the majority principle of Duma elections. It was assumed that this would make the deputy corps more loyal and amorphous. This article examines the aggravation of political contradictions between the president and the deputies of the Second Duma in connection with his intention to radically change the rules of the “electoral game”. The analysis is based on the complex of the sources (regulatory legal acts, the Federal Assembly and media materials). The research subject is a political conflict in the context of a certain historical situation. Its resolution involved much larger political consequences than simply choosing an electoral system. There is so far no attempt to study the electoral reform in 1997-1999 as a complex political and legal problem. The clash between the president and the parliament over the procedure for electing Duma deputies was one of the many conflicts that were the essentials of the Russian political process in the 1990s. However, after the adoption of the 1993 Constitution, these contradictions were being resolved by legal means within the framework of public policy. The problem of the optimal electoral system and possible ways of improving the Russian electoral law were also publicly debated. The Constitutional Court played a special role in the overcoming of this conflict between the two branches of power and updating the electoral laws. Thus, the joint efforts of the three branches of power, as well as the academic community, helped to make the Russian electoral system better and more adequate to a specific socio-political situation, though it did not guarantee truly fair elections.