Antonov Dmitry Evgen’evich

This article analyzes the diff erences between legal and political approaches to the defi nition of the content of the category “subject of the electoral process.” The purpose of the article is to operationalize this category from the perspective of political science. The regulatory-legal approach prevailing in Russian political science does not allow for analysis of the political strategies of all possible participants of electoral interactions. The author proposes to understand the electoral process as part of the political process, and presents its subjects as agents implementing their own strategies. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the neo-institutional approach, which allows us to consider the political process as a system of interactions among diff erent actors in the electoral space.