Russia Parliamentary election 2016 (State Duma — Gosduma) — Results

The essentials

Russia elected the seventh State Duma on 18 September 2016, and the ruling United Russia party achieved the largest majority in the chamber's post-Soviet history: 343 of 450 seats — a constitutional supermajority — on 54.20% of the party-list vote. The election was moved forward from December to September and, more consequentially, restored the mixed electoral system abolished a decade earlier: 225 seats by nationwide party-list proportional representation (5% threshold) and 225 in single-member districts by first-past-the-post. United Russia won 203 of the 225 districts, converting its list vote into three-quarters of the chamber.

The reported result

Behind United Russia came the familiar "systemic opposition": the Communist Party (CPRF) with 13.34% and 42 seats, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's LDPR almost level on 13.14% with 39, and A Just Russia with 6.22% and 23 — all three losing heavily to the district sweep. Communists of Russia (2.27%) and the liberal Yabloko (2.00%) fell far below the threshold. Single seats went to Rodina, Civic Platform and one independent. Turnout, officially 47.88%, was the lowest for any post-Soviet federal election to that date, with participation in Moscow and St Petersburg around 35%.

The setting

The vote was the first Duma election after the 2011 poll whose falsification claims triggered the largest protests of the Putin era, and the Kremlin managed it differently: Ella Pamfilova, a respected rights ombudsman, was installed to head the Central Election Commission, some liberal parties were allowed on the ballot, and overt ballot-box stuffing was reduced in the big cities. But the underlying conditions — state media dominance, exclusion or marginalisation of genuine opposition figures, pressure on observers — were unchanged, and independent analysts (notably the statistician Sergey Shpilkin) estimated millions of anomalous votes in United Russia's total. It was also the first State Duma election held in annexed Crimea, which Ukraine and most of the international community condemned as illegitimate.

Why it mattered

The 2016 election perfected the machinery that has defined Russian parliamentary politics since: a lower list result than 2007's peak, but a bigger majority, thanks to the single-member districts. With 343 seats United Russia could amend the constitution alone — a power it would use in 2020 to reset Vladimir Putin's presidential term count. The four-party cartel of United Russia, CPRF, LDPR and A Just Russia survived intact, with every faction reliably supporting the Kremlin's foreign and security policy.

Reading the numbers

Percentages on this page are the Central Election Commission's official shares of all ballots cast, exactly as published, to two decimal places; seat totals combine list and district mandates. Official per-region tables exist only in the CEC's Russian-language database, so no interactive regional map is shown for this election.

Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.