PRIMARIES AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION OF PARTIES

The article is devoted to the procedure of conducting primaries - preliminary intraparty voting in Russia and participation in primaries of political parties. The subject of the article “Primaries as a form of political participation of parties” is primaries. The purpose of the article is to study the procedure of primaries as a form of political participation of political parties. The article presents various methods, such as analysis, comparative method, survey, which to a greater extent make it possible to define the conceptual apparatus, to conduct a comprehensive analysis of primaries. Primaries are used in the electoral systems of the USA, Italy, Russia and other countries. The history of primaries in Russia dates back to 2000, and the United Russia party held its first primaries in 2007 in order to determine the party's candidates for the elections. It can be noted that despite the rather long existence of primaries in the Russian political process, there is still no single legal interpretation of the primaries procedure. Today, attempts are being made in Russia to institutionalize primaries as a form of political and legal participation of parties in electoral procedures, which is confirmed by the data of recent electoral campaigns. Primaries are firmly included in the electoral process as pre-election intra-party voting, which allows forming lists of participants in the elections from a political party at the preliminary stage of the elections. In Russia, with its imitation democracy, primaries in “systemic” parties can also be called imitation. In non-systemic opposition blocs, we can sometimes observe honest primaries; these parties have no chance of getting into power even at the regional level, because primaries are actively used only by United Russia. As a result of the work, the author comes to the conclusion that the Russian version of the primaries is far from perfect and needs careful refinement of the legal and technological aspects of the primaries and requires rethinking the true objectives of the procedure, which was projected from the American political reality to the unprepared Russian electoral procedure. The results of the study can be applied when conducting primaries by political parties and their regional branches in the conditions of the Transbaikal Territory.