Articles

This article substantiates the relevance assigned to the blogosphere at the regional level, highlighting its spatial borders and suggesting criteria for its selection as an independent unit of the communication space, including: the presence of private information and event-driven topics; the activities of a regional community that discusses this subject and creates new content on this basis; and awareness by the regional community of itself as a distinct social group. The authors also address the issue of the mechanisms of the blogosphere’s influence on the regional political process and its interaction with actors such as the media and the political elite. The dynamics of the formation of the blogosphere in the Krasnodar Krai as a communication space element are also examined. The authors conclude that the regional blogosphere is characterized by significant differentiation by place and topic of communication, and that the most popular discussions are those of social and political events. The political segment of the region’s blogosphere has a relatively low level of dissidence, notwithstanding the presence of significant critical potential in relation to the activities of the authorities.

This article is devoted to analysis of the processes of development of modern information and communication technologies and the transformation of the modern information society that accompany a transition to the new paradigm of a network communications society. The author describes the fundamentally new role of online resources as a tool for the creation of social communication relations, which become a new form of socio-political and economic capitalization and acquire independent value. The article maintains that communication itself takes on independent meaning and political significance, affecting the perception of the information conveyed via communication technologies. The author concludes that the transformation of the socio-political structure of modern states is inevitable.
Challenges and threats associated with information technology and the inequality of modern states take on a new meaning in this context due to the fact that technologically advanced nations have significant opportunities for large-scale extraterritorial impact on the population of target states with lower technological potential.

Concepts, images and pictures of the future in the minds of ordinary citizens serve as a sort of frame for comparison of reality with images of the possible and desirable, serving a normative function. The construction of future images is included in the mission and professional duty of the political elite. By its nature the elite is obliged to consider the risks that today’s decisions hold for the future. Scenarios with different time horizons play a role as an instrument of such strategy construction, most often in the social and political spheres. Prognoses are made on the bases of certain scenarios, as are certain strategies and specific policy decisions. The introduction of a humanitarian dimension into the scenarios (artistic, historical, psychological and moral elements) often facilitates a more precise prognosis than economic, sociological or strictly statistical parameters. The analysis of images of the future in people’s mentality not only indicates what qualities the citizenry finds lacking in the authorities of today — which makes it possible to correct certain decisions and actions — it also allows present-day planning to take into account societal expectations.

The current growing interest in the concept of “political space” is largely associated with its use within constructivist studies. Adopting this perspective, this article examines the construction of political space in tsarist country residences of the 17th century and identifi es two methods employed in the process. The first led to the creation of a hierarchically (vertically) organized political space, the second — to a horizontal space. In the fi rst case, only representatives of the supreme power were endowed with political subjectivity, while in the second every participant in the political communication process was. Both methods were used simultaneously, which was caused not only by the need to satisfy private interests, but also by the need for empowering interaction, when subjects received certain benefi ts in exchange for recognition of the legitimacy of the supreme power.

This article comprehensively analyzes — for the fi rst time in the history of the political science discipline — the historic results of the work of 11th World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Moscow in 1979 and its contemporary signifi cance. The author sets out the experience of preparing for the Congress, key problems connected with it and theses presented during the Congress. Special attention is paid to the study of the complex organizational work of International Political Science Association and the Soviet Political Science Association. The author analyzes the role of foreign and Russian political and social scientists in the Moscow Congress using the methods of expert analysis. The article discusses in detail the work of the Congress, offers characterizations of its structures and speakers, and provides information about the participants from all continents and countries. The signifi cance of the Moscow congress is that it marked the beginning of the diffi cult process of institutionalization of political science in the USSR and strengthened the role of Soviet political scientists in the International Political Science Association.

The subject of this article is the genesis of the socio-philosophical interpretation of the concept of the spectacle, known from the book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by the French philosopher and fi lmmaker Guy Debord. The author presents an analysis of an array of Debord’s texts from different years, with the goal of distinguishing and examining the main stages of the formation of the concept and the transformation of its meaning. The study goes from the implicit presence of the concept in the avant-garde practices of the representatives of the Letterist artistic movement (including Debord himself) to the first, purely esthetic and cultural interpretation of the concept, presented in works by Debord in 1957–1960 — and further, to the semantic extension of the concept presented in Debord’s 1960 article “Preliminaries Toward Defi ning a Unitary Revolutionary Program,” and to the completed socio-philosophical concept as presented in two books, The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. The article also examines the events of Debord’s political and artistic biography which formed the context of the process under study.

This study presents a comparative analysis of three different methods of measuring the quality of deliberation by their ability to resolve the main contradictions in the concepts of impartiality, equality and the common good in Jürgen Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. The analyzed methods — M.R. Steenbergen’s Discourse Quality Index (DQI); the DQI variant of André Bächtiger et al.; and the method used by Simon Niemeyer and John Dryzek — differ from the point of view of orientation toward the process / result of deliberation, which allows one to give a complex assessment of the effectiveness of one or another method of measuring the quality of discourse. The author concludes that each method contributes to the solution of deliberative theory’s problems of impartiality, equality and achieving the common good from different angles. Nevertheless, the question of uniting these methods into a single compromising instrument is still open, promising and relevant.

This article analyzes three problem groups: problems of neo-corporatism — both “classical” (the erosion of stable classes and groups and the transition of social practices to the meso-level) and new ones that have emerged in the 21st century; problems of the further fragmentation of consensual practices; and the complications of consensus-building in the context of fairly closed and non-public real management structures and the erosion of stable social strata. The article addresses different political science approaches to solving socio-economic problems within the neo-corporatist framework as well as socio-psychological arguments — in particular those related to specifi cities of contemporary political behavior and political differentiation — that also demonstrate the diffi culty of a neo-corporate model. The author points to some drawbacks of description and of prescriptions for the development of Russian neo-corporatism that exist in Russian scholarship owing to the lack of attention to new problems of neo-corporatism and to an orientation toward European corporativist practices of the beginning of 1990s.