Conservative-Traditionalist Agenda in Inter-Party Debate

The article is devoted to the place of conservative-traditionalist topics in the actual political agenda of Russia in the last decade. The research is based on the materials of the project Actual political agenda of Russia in inter-party debate, executed in the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of the author. It was established that conservative-traditionalist themes began to enter the country’s current political agenda since the mid-2010s. Three of the 24 questions related to it belong to the foreign policy issue domain, the rest to the worldview one. 16 of the 24 questions meet the criteria of including in the current political agenda, that is, on the one hand, they generate polarization of positions, and on the other hand, they involve a fairly wide range of participants in the discussion. Factor analysis of party positions on conservative-traditionalist agenda issues revealed two dimensions: “modernists versus traditionalists” and “conservatives versus liberals”. In the first one, liberals (Yabloko and New People) are opposed to everyone else; in the second one, the main opponents are Yabloko and Rodina. The comparison of these two dimensions with main political dimensions and subject sub-dimensions, identified in the framework of the Actual political agenda project, shows that the dimension “modernists— traditionalists” correlates most strongly with the sub-dimension “originalists— Westerners” in the worldview issue domain and the first main political dimension, which in turn also correlates most strongly with the same sub-dimension. The dimension “conservatives—liberals” correlates most strongly with the sub-dimension “hawks—doves” in the foreign policy issue domain. In general, the author’s research gives grounds to assert that conservative-traditionalist topics, which, in particular, introduce into the agenda such concepts as sovereignty, great power and empire, play a leading role in the formation of the political space of present-day Russia, and over the past year it has reached its peak

Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies