The Public Sphere in Russia between Authoritarianism and Liberation, Vol. 27 - 2020, No. 1
Guest Edited by Tatiana Weiser and Greg Yudin
Governing Through Polls: Politics of Representation and Presidential Support in Putin's Russia
Russian elections have been severely compromised by allegations of fraud, which makes public opinion polls an important source of information about popular support for Vladimir Putin and his policies. Putin's high ratings as well as the wide use of polls by his administration suggest that his rule is essentially democratic. This paper challenges this view by discussing the specific conception of democratic representation behind polling practices. Far from being a perfect mode of representation, opinion polls are capable of manufacturing the political reality they represent. The paper demonstrates how Russian authorities use polls to replace referenda and to legitimize the results of elections and thereby exposes the representational machine that turns polls into an efficient tool for governance, maintaining the hegemony and promoting de-politicisation. The distinction between partial and total representation, drawn from Ernesto Laclau's work, serves to illuminate the cases when polls and official election returns actually diverge and shows how the legitimacy of a regime is secured by the politics of representation that leaves a significant part of the Russian population unrepresented.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article
Democratic Agnosia: The Reduction of the Political Public Sphere to Elections and Polls in Russia
The article addresses the extent to which current developments in the political public sphere in contemporary Russia might be seen as manifestations and maybe condensations of developments in representative democracies in a more general sense. These developments concern the ways that elections and other practices of voting achieve a hegemonic significance as processes of symbolization in the political public sphere. The first section outlines the role of voting practices for the legitimation and stability of Russia’s current super-presidentialism. The second section connects these findings to a theoretical framework that capitalizes on the symbolic effects of elections and polling practices in democratic political and societal orders. Here critics of representative democracy and of majority rule, which highlight the contradictory role of majority decisions in democratic institutional and imaginary orders, will be discussed and related to the mass protests against election fraud in 2011 and 2012. The third section reconceptualizes the current problematics of the political public sphere in contemporary Russia. The overall aim is thus not to measure political-public developments in Russia against the normative yardstick of allegedly uncontested democratic development in western societies, but rather to situate Russia on a conceptual map of a generic crisis of majority rule.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article
When Public is Not Enough: A Local Russian Social Movement Between Suppression and Depoliticisation
This paper suggests an approach to Russian politics through the theory of depoliticisation. The author suggests that administrative methods of neutralisation and modes of depoliticisation of public discussions are similar in both local and country level of contentious politics. This paper analyses a case of social movement against an extraction project in Russian agricultural region that was approved by the government and initiated by one of the biggest Russian mining companies. The local movement was inspired by the protest movement of 2011–12 and hastened development of local public. Both of the movements faced similar methods of depoliticisation and suppression, but despite the one against extraction was anchored in the local community and protested visible problems, it was divided and mostly dissolved by the end of 2014. Analysis reveals typical tactics of depoliticising conflicts used in controlling political discussion in Russia.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article
When Ritual Becomes Protest: Crossing the Bridge of Russian Mourning
Grassroots memorials have become well known for scholars since the 1980s. The researchers mostly place these practices in between public grievances and grassroots political protest. I propose a not less productive way to analyse these kinds of memorials, considering them as a channel for self-representation in the public sphere that is used by margin social and political groups. In societies where access to the public sphere is limited, a non-conventional mechanism that lets margin groups represent themselves via non-political practices, such as a funeral rite, may appear. The public nature of the funeral rite allows political groups to use it as an occasion to mobilise supporters. The commemorative background of these gatherings prevents them from being considered as a political manifestation, nor do they have any organiser who could be legally penalised. Thus, death-related rituals, including grassroots memorialisation, appear to be an effective channel for margin political groups to represent themselves and even to state and promote their political ideas. In this paper, I will analyse this phenomenon using current Russian observational data and show how these practices become an important channel for political opposition in Russia to communicate with the electorate, opponents and authority.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article
Discussing The Use of Public Goods for Private Ends
How to make sense of the face-to-face public discussion of the distribution of public funds? In this article, I argue that physical co-presence of citizens in course of collective deliberation gives the underrepresented social groups opportunities to speak out their concerns and express their social positions. In a discussion that I co-organised with support of a few local cultural organisations, participants faced a possibility to practice critical debates regarding the decisions of the municipal, regional and central authorities. I present a case study that contributes to the literature by describing the “openings” in public indifference that have implications for practice and policies. I reflect on the public discussion as an opportunity to engage into a dialogue a general public, activists, scholars, officials and experts and imagine alternative ways for democratic deliberation. This article links together the problems of distribution of public goods and engaging public into the organisation of mega-events in the light of the predicaments of the capitalist urban development.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article
Speaking Without Listening: Imitating Dissensus in the Agonistic Public Debates in Russian Political Talk-Shows in the 2010s
The article aims to give an overview of the Russian public communication in the genre of public agonistic debates in the 2010s. This genre is not yet so traditional for Russia considering its long Soviet history where monological authoritarian tradition of the official discourse did not allow for the development of an agonistic culture. Today we say that though the freedom of speech is our privilege and a public value, the main media channels in the country are subject to State control and are subsidised or ideologically influenced by the State. What nevertheless attracts our attention within this monopolised paradigm is the appearance of a new media culture of public dissensus. In this article, I analyse how public agonistic debates function in today’s Russia and whether they really accomplish their purpose of creating a new public culture of plurality and diversity or just imitate it in order to impose the official State ideology.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis)
|
Export Reference
|
Link to this article