Fedorov Vladislav Ivanovich

The article presents the results of the analysis of political news about electronic voting on YouTube. The research focuses on 12 countries that have made electronic voting the only or a widely used way to implement active suffrage (Belgium, Brazil, the Kingdom of Bhutan, Venezuela, India, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Namibia, the Philippines, Switzerland, Estonia and Russia). The main tasks of the research were: to collect a database of videos about electronic voting; to determine the tone of the coverage of electronic voting in each considered country; to identify trends in the use of YouTube as an outreach channel. This methodological process was set to answer the main research question: what type of attitude to electronic voting is shaped by political news about electronic voting in YouTube: neutral, positive or negative? Finally, based on the analysis of existing conceptual and theoretical approaches to the issue of impact of social networks on political processes, the article attempts to test the explanatory capacity of the concept of ‘information capsule’ in relation to political news about electronic voting on YouTube.