Paradigms of social development
Does Modern Mass Conciousness Exist?
Keywords: Modernity, archaic, mass consciousness, technosphere, machinery, political consciousness, schizophrenic consciousness, ideology, mythology
Does modern mass consciousness actually exist? To answer this question L. Fishman draws attention to a paradox in social studies. On the one hand, mass consciousness is known to stem from everyday routine, on the other hand, the studies of real mass consciousness tend to focus on its superficial manifestations determined by political ideologies, ephemeral states of mind, manipulative influence of the mass media, etc. Moreover, most popular socio-philosophical concepts describe Modernity as devoid of its own constants of being. Hence, it becomes impossible to single out modern mass consciousness, which succumbs to the association with pre-modern heritage. Fishman offers an alternative approach to studying modern mass consciousness as determined by lifestyle in technogenic environment and uses Russian and foreign realities to analyze some elements of this consciousness.
Electoral Process
Disproportional Russia. Territorial Representation in State Duma under Proportional Electoral System
Keywords: electoral systems, political representation, center-regions relations
A.Kynev analyzes the results of Duma elections in 1993—2016 to show that the Russian model of mandates’ distribution within party lists leads to a significant distortion of regional representation in favor of the regions with the least competitive elections. Such model also stipulates the replacement of party competition with competition between regions and transforms elections into the battle of administrative resources, which encourages local governments to engage in election fraud. This results in even lower level of party competition as well as diminishes parties’ influence in general. According to Kynev, only radical reform of electoral model can fix the status quo. Electoral system should guarantee that territories obtain an adequate representation in parliament in proportion to the number of voters in these territories.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2017-86-3-25-41
Rostislav Turovsky, Yury Gaivoronsky
Economic Influence on Electoral Behavior in Russia: is "Contract" Between Power and Society Working?
Keywords: elections, electoral behavior, economic voting, regions of Russia
The article studies the influence of economic factors on the electoral behavior of Russians during the federal parliamentary elections in 2003—2016. The conducted research proved the existence of the so-called “Putin contract”, but also revealed a number of patterns that partially contradict initial assumptions. According to their statistical model, in dynamics economic voting in Russia manifests itself as an exchange of population’s loyalty for medium-term economic growth and lower poverty levels. However, this is different from “voting with your wallet” and seeking immediate benefits, which, añcording to R.Turovsky and Yu. Gaivoronsky, partly explains the absence of the negative trend in the performance of the “United Russia” in 2016 elections: two years of crisis were not enough for the electorate to lose trust in current power that earned a certain level of credibility.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2017-86-3-42-61
Alexei Gilev, Andrey Semenov, Irina Shevtsova
"Political Machines" and their "Drivers": Electoral Administration at Local Level
Keywords: local politics, political machines, elections, sub-national politics
A.Gilev, A.Semenov and I.Shevtsova analyze correlation between professional career of local authorities and electoral results of the “party of power”, appealing to the explanatory power of a “political machine” concept and relying on the database that includes biographies of municipal heads in three Russian regions. The study shows that heads of local governments, who previously held positions of a deputy mayor, heads of departments or other high posts in local administration, secure better electoral results for the “party of power’ than those with business or legislative backgrounds. Skills of managing local “political machines” are formed within the executive branch, and the “machines” themselves are quite stable. Thus, mobilization of such “machines” does not require either long training or extraordinary abilities from new leaders.
Political theories
Keywords: political trust, faith, communication, presupposition
The article is devoted to the phenomenon of political trust. Drawing an analogy with the role of presuppositions in a language, A.Kaniukov ana- lyzes the role of trust in a political space and identifies a number of ways to further our understanding of this concept. The article raises a series of ques- tions, including whether political trust is real, in what ways the concept of trust relates to the concept of confidence, how this phenomenon relates to religion and fanaticism, and whether trust can be viewed as a process of communication. Particular attention is paid to understanding the relation- ship between trust and faith. The author concludes that recognizing the enormous role of faith in the political process should increase the society’s ability to resist political manipulation. Understanding that there is no place for knowledge in the political space, and there is only faith, will promote the development of critical thinking and tolerance and, as a result, contribute to the development of civil society.
Historical Retrospective: Contemplations and Hypotheses
Andrey Shcherbak, Yana Gerina, Daria Berdyuzhenko, Alina Mendygalieva, Anastasia Zaitseva
Foreign Policy Influence on USSR's Ethnic Policy
Keywords: nationalism, ethnic policy of the USSR, foreign policy of the USSR, geopolitical theory of Collins
The article explores the reasons behind the ebbs and flows in the Soviet ethnic policy. Building on the geopolitical theory of R.Collins, the authors hypothesize that the ethnic policy of the USSR was closely connected with its foreign policy. The authors study the dynamics of the Soviet ethnic policy and compare it with the dynamics of geopolitical tensions to conclude that the changes in priorities that defined the principles of interethnic relations in the USSR at least in part depended on the level of geopolitical tensions in the international arena. At the times when “peaceful coexistence” prevailed in foreign policy, the Soviet leadership pursued the policy of “indigenization”, encouraged the development of ethnic minorities, nurtured their cultures and identity. The escalation of the international conflict bred the need for national unity, which spurred shifts towards the policy of Russification.
Religion and Politics
Keywords: welfare state, religion, religiosity, Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity
The article examines the influence of religion on the attitudes of Europe- ans towards the welfare state. A.Kulkova performs multilevel statistical analyses of the data from the fourth wave of the European Social Survey conducted in 27 European countries to conclude that individual religiosity, as well as the affiliation with the Catholic or Protestant tradition, has a negative impact on the perception of the welfare state. Contrary to that, Orthodox Christianity at both the individual and country levels is associated with an increased support for redistribution. At the same time, while there is a pronounced negative relationship between religiosity and the attitudes towards the welfare state in the countries without a communist past, in the post-communist countries, the higher levels of religiosity have almost no effect on the attitudes towards redistribution.
Cathedra
Keywords: theory of one-party dominance, dominant party, one-party dominance cycle, Maurice Duverger, Giovanni Sartori
The article reviews more than 65-year experience of studying dominant-party systems based on the analysis of a set of empirical and theoretical works devoted to the phenomenon of one-party dominance. In the first part of the article published in this issue A.Ostroverkhov examines the stages of one-party dominance conceptualization and compares the main approaches to defining a dominant party and a dominant-party system, revealing insurmountable contradictions between Political Sociology and Political Science regarding this problem. If Political Sociology views one-party dominance as a predominant influence of a particular party in a society caused by certain socio-psychological, cultural-historical, economic and politico-legal reasons, Political Science views it as a merely quantitative superiority of the ruling party over its rivals.
Gubernatorial readings
Keywords: political elite, state management, management apparatus, recruitment channels
The material published here is a report on the Twenty-Ninth Gubernatorial Readings held in Tyumen, June 6th, 2017, under the framework of the joint project conducted by the journal Politeia and the administration of Tyumen region. The topic of the Readings is the channels and mechanisms of recruiting political elites and the effectiveness of public administration. The lecture is delivered by O.V. Gaman-Golutvina, the President of the Russian Association of Political Science, Chair of the Department of Comparative Political Science, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Professor-Researcher at the Higher School of Economics.
Book Review
Keywords: Pierre Bourdieu, state, legitimacy, universal, official
Although P.Bourdieu’s course of lectures on the state (published in Russian in 2016) first appeared a quarter of a century ago, it is still interesting today and not solely as a monument to the social and theoretical thought. A.Teslya believes that from the contemporary perspective the main question to this work is about the state’s loss of monopoly on the universal that has become obvious over the past decades. According to Bourdieu’s logic, the state, while remaining the main creator of the official, is now increasingly losing its status of the universal. In other words, its role as a source of legitimate violence is no longer indisputable. The state is less able to act as a field of fields and represents only one of the fields among others. This raises the problem of the production of order, because the possibility for different groups to obtain benefits from what Bourdieu calls “logical and moral integration” is determined by the order itself being a common good.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2017-86-3-181-187
Keywords: informal economy, Political Science, constructivist approach
E.Leontyeva highly praises S.Barsukova’s book and believes that the book is extremely useful for political scientists who are trying to understand the organization of political reality that falls outside the sphere of attention of the traditional Political Science. The book is organized as a series of essays devoted to the most famous concepts of informality. It represents an independent composition that puts all analyzed researchers and their ideas into a single semantic field rather than a mere collection of reviews. The author treats this semantic field as a panoramic vision of the informal economy, in which individual fragments, sorted out on the basis of the reviewed books, become the fundamental “bricks” of the construction. As a result, we can see the gradual “manifestation” of informality, which is usually hidden not only from the eyes of a man in the street or a policy maker, but also those of a researcher.