application ‘ _Nash Gorod_ ’ and register with the mobile phone number. They can then send complaints, selecting a problem they encounter, and accompanying the message with a photo. All complaints are accumulated in the portal’s ‘editing office,’ where thirty moderators assign the complaints to authorities responsible for the specific road under question. These decisions are made within 24 hours. The portal claims that most problems are resolved on average in five days. On the issue of road maintenance, the portal adheres to the city Resolution 762-PP,<sup>8</sup> which requires the ongoing road repairs in response to public complaints to be completed within eight business days from the time of the complaint. Because of its simplicity of use and effectiveness with public service delivery, the portal has since become the largest aggregator of complaints about potholes along with complaints in other spheres of life in Moscow, such as public transportation, various municipal services, illegal businesses, abandoned vehicles, street advertisement issues, etc. Currently, the site reports over 1.5 million portal users and over 3.9 million resolved complaints since 2011.

# Data and Empirical Model

Our analysis employs data at the municipal level of the city of Moscow over the period between the two most recent mayoral election rounds, 2013 and 2018. We scrape the electoral data (votes for the registered candidates and the turnout) from the Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation website.<sup>9</sup> We scrape the data about pothole complaints from the two online platforms described in the section above: _Rosyama_ (7,709 total complaints) and _Nash Gorod_ (205,935 total complaints).<sup>10</sup> As we explain above, while having considerably fewer records, the former platform was important in the early years of our data sample. Both online platforms provide information about the location of the pothole (at the municipal level), the date the complaint was registered, the unique user id who has registered the complaint, and the outcome of the complaint. Additionally, the _Nash Gorod_ website reports the information about the municipal authority responsible for addressing the complaint, the dates when the authority responded to the complaint, and when the

> 8 Entitled: “On approval of the Requirements for the sanitary-technical maintenance of the road facilities of the Moscow city road network and the Procedure for the overhaul, maintenance, marking and maintenance of the road facilities of the Moscow city road network”.

> 9 <u>http://www.izbirkom.ru</u> [last accessed: September 2020].

> 10 Not only city authorities in Moscow but also other pro-government organizations have introduced their own online platforms for reporting potholes and other road-related problems. The pro-government NGO “All-Russian People's - Front" (ONF), for example, introduced online platform https://dorogi <u>onf.ru/</u> for reporting potholes and other roadrelated problems. This and other platforms, however, are not very popular among Moscow residents. Over the entire period of the study the ONF website has registered less than 300 complaints. These data are therefore not included in our analysis.

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