Political Change in Leningrad

In this chapter we analyze the results of the March 1990 elections to the Lensovet, the Leningrad city council. Given the lack of demographic information about the electorate, we cannot ask why individual voters voted the way they did, so we ask instead why some candidates fared better than others. The use of regression analysis allows us to weigh the influence of various characteristics of the candidates—their age, gender, occupation, and, most interestingly, their affiliation with a reformist political group—and thereby investigate the relative importance of these factors to voters in Leningrad.