'Red versus expert' - Candidate recruitment and communist party adaptation in post-Soviet politics

This paper focuses on the political evolution and behavior of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) from 1991 to 1995. In particular, 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 - comparing the KPRF's candidate recruitment behavior for the State Duma elections of 1993 and 1995. However rather than describe what the party has done in terms of candidate recruitment, I derive a set of theoretical expectations from both the general literature on party behavior in the West and in Eastern Europe, and analyze the candidate recruitment behavior of the KPRF as an empirical test of these expectations. Second, this paper assesses the extent to which the types of candidates the party recruited for the single-mandate districts in 1995 affected the probability of their winning election.