Will United Russia (ER) win the most seats in the next Russian parliamentary election?

United Russia won 324 of 450 Duma seats in 2021 — 72% of the chamber — in a managed electoral environment specifically designed to produce that outcome. The party has delivered 300-plus seats in successive Duma elections across two decades. National polling still shows United Russia leading by a wide margin over the Communist Party, LDPR, and New People. And yet prediction markets are pricing this contract at 60-70% rather than the 90-plus percent that structural factors would suggest. That pricing gap is the most analytically interesting thing about this contract. Two explanations deserve consideration. The first is genuine regime uncertainty. Russia is conducting a war in Ukraine that has produced unexpected military setbacks, economic pressure from sanctions, and domestic political stress that includes the Wagner mutiny and ongoing elite tensions. A managed electoral system can absorb normal political discontent — it cannot necessarily absorb a regime-level crisis that disrupts the administrative machinery that delivers United Russia's seat totals. Traders pricing 30-40% probability of a non-United Russia outcome may be pricing that systemic risk rather than expecting a genuine electoral upset. The second explanation is thin liquidity producing imprecise pricing. Low-volume markets on obscure international elections often produce prices that reflect limited informed trading rather than genuine probability assessment. A 60-70% price on an outcome with 95-plus percent structural probability would be a significant mispricing if it reflects liquidity rather than genuine uncertainty. The structural case for United Russia remains overwhelming. Administrative resources, candidate disqualification powers, media control, and single-member district gerrymandering all work to preserve its plurality regardless of genuine vote share movements. The systemic opposition parties are designed to finish second, not first. Bottom line: United Russia winning the most Duma seats is the structural default that 20 years of precedent supports. The 60-70% market pricing either reflects genuine regime-stability uncertainty in a wartime environment or thin-liquidity mispricing — distinguishing between those two explanations is the actual analytical question this contract poses. Watch for any significant Russian domestic political instability as the specific signal that would validate the uncertainty interpretation over the mispricing interpretation.