MOSCOW, June, 1, 2007. Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) submits a forecast of the results of December 2 State Duma elections.

Election attendance forecast. In may, over half of respondents (57,5%) claimed they would participate in elections (among them 26.5% identify that they definitely will vote and 31.0% identify that they more likely will). 28,9% of voters are not going to participate in the elections (among them 16.6% identify that they more likely won't participate and 12.3% say that for sure).

However, in general, pre-electoral intentions of voters differ with real results of elections. Thus, polls conducted before the local Legislative Assemblies elections of 2005-2007 showed the 55% intention to participate in the elections. Yet only 39.1% of voters showed up. That is why currently VCIOM and ZIRKON experts evaluate the possible attendance to elections of December, 2, 2007 as 43.7% level.

The Results of December, 7, 2007 voting forecast are evaluated on the basis of current All-Russia opinion polls, held by VCIOM and on the basis of the results of researches conducted during local Legislative Assemblies elections of 2005-2007. The forecast considers the following factors:

• discrepancies of parties ratings discovered via sociological surveys and via elections results (these discrepancies are also caused by the fact the voters make their political choice at the last moment);
• the so-called ‘spiral of silence', i.e. insincerity of considerable part of respondents, who do not want to uncover their actual political views;
• some respondents' attempt to stick to socially approved behavior model, that is transformed to overestimated leading party support;
• uneven level of electoral activity of different parties supporters;
• parties regional offices activity and success in participating local Legislative Assemblies elections.

Taking into account those factors as well as some others, VCIOM experts have come up with a model based on applying increasing and decreasing coefficients, which have been estimated on the basis of matching survey results and actual local elections results (in overall 540 observations - pairs ‘party results-survey party result' - were considered). Parties that got lower result in surveys than in actual elections were granted with increasing coefficient. Parties that got higher result in surveys than in actual surveys were granted with decreasing coefficient.

During mathematical data processing the coefficients of probabilistic model of forecast results for 9 parties were estimated. Mean results of regional elections of 2006-2007 were applied for the other parties. The regional research data does not allow to obtain valid basis for estimating the coefficient for those parties. We also applied decreasing coefficient for the parties that have participated only in a small part of regional elections. The highest discrepancies in declared views and actual vote are among electorate of ‘People's party', ‘Union of Right Forces', ‘Residents' Force' and ‘Unified Russia‘.

 State Duma 5th convocation mandate distribution forecast.

Only four parties overcome 7% barrier: ‘Unified Russia', Communist Party, Fair Russia and Liberal Party. The part of ‘unproductive' votes is 18.1%. That is why deputies' mandates in the following State Duma can be distributed in this way:

This forecast is only preliminary, since it is announced half a year before the elections. The situation can change during elections campaigns a lot. Our next public forecast of the results of State Duma elections is going to be published by VCIOM in August, 31, 2007.