While the preceding chapter showed why some parties survived while others did not as of 2004, it left two key questions unanswered. First, just how strong have these various surviving Russian parties been? That is, does Chapter 2's account of why some parties beat out others merely reflect the weak defeating the weak, or have parties proven to be capable of mobilizing a great deal of electoral support for their candidates? Second, irrespective of whether they have been capable of aiding their candidates in significant measure, to what extent have these parties actually penetrated and structured Russia's political process from the national to the regional? That is, to what degree can we characterize Russia as having had a party system at all through 2004? As was discussed in some detail in Chapter 1, observers have advanced very different opinions on these questions, with some arguing Russian parties have been strong and/or growing while others insist that they have been weak and/or in decline.

This chapter makes a systematic endeavor to answer these two central questions for the period from the Soviet breakup to 2004. Successive sections assess the strength of parties in the electorate generally, in the federal executive branch, in the federal legislature, in the regional executive branch, and in regional legislatures. The discussion of parties in the electorate relies primarily on surveys of voters themselves, exploring different measures of voters' relationships to parties in order to determine more precisely the degree to which parties during this period were communicating policy stands to potential voters and were in fact cultivating mass-level attachments and structuring potential voters' political attitudes and activities.