POLITICAL CLEAVAGE STRUCTURE IN RUSSIA BEFORE THE 2016 DUMA ELECTION

Author: KORGUNYUK Yu.G.

Communicology. 2016. v.4, n.4
KORGUNYUK Yury Grigor’evich – Doctor of Political Sciences, Ph.D. in History, Principal Researcher of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Abstract: The article analyzes the political space of post-Soviet Russia from the point of view of the cleavage theory. It is pointed out that the Russian political space was formed in 1993-2011 by three main cleavages (dimensions): the first of them had a socioeconomic nature, the third – an authoritarian-democratic one, while between them the so called systemic dimension was located which combined features of the first and the second ones and indicated the direction of the development of the system as a whole. It is pointed out also that the authoritarian-democratic cleavage came to the fore in 2012-2013, then the so called ‘Ukrainian’ (imperialists vs anti-imperialists) did so in 2014, while the authoritarian-democratic and socioeconomic cleavages merged since 2015 in a single ‘power vs opposition’ cleavage. The systemic (‘Ukrainian’) cleavage’s coming out to the forefront is appreciated as an evidence that the political system loses its balance.

Keywords: parliamentarian elections, post-Soviet Russia, political parties, cleavage theory, political cleavages, electoral cleavages, mathematic methods in political science, factor analysis

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