Center for the Study of Democratic Politics

Maria Petrova's work on electoral fraud in Russia is highlighted on the Princeton University website, including several interactive features that allow the user to view details of her experimental data. Professor Petrova (CSDP fellow this year) conducted a large-scale field experiment during the December 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, the results of which suggest that fraud had a significant impact on the election results. The research marks an advance in efforts to quantify vote fraud.

The researchers, including a visiting research scholar at Princeton University, estimate that fraud accounted for at least 11 percentage points of the vote recorded for the ruling United Russia party in Moscow. They estimated that the party received at least 635,000 votes in the city as a result of fraud in the election, which resulted in United Russia retaining its majority in parliament.

"We started this just as a project for the public good, and we didn't think about writing an academic paper. But when we saw the effects were so huge we decided that we needed to write about it," said Maria Petrova, the UBS Associate Professor of Economics at the New Economic School in Moscow and a visiting research scholar at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics this academic year.