A DH perspective on sub-national governance in Russia

On May 17th, Digital Russia Studies spring seminars series featured two presentations on sub-national governance in Russia – both using digital humanities methods.

DRS co-founder, Daria Gritsenko, introduced the new research project “Algorithmic Governance in Context(s): Civic technology in Russian regions”. This project led by Daria Gritsenko and Andrey Indukaev studies the digitalization of local governance in Russia. The project aims to understand what makes local administrations implement digital tools of civil participation (civic tech) in the Russian regions. The key hypothesis of the project is that there is no single pathway to civic tech uptake, but the reasons vary between the regions: some do it because of the local administration’s interest in digital tools, while others respond to the ‘push from below’ – the needs of the local civil society. The seminar participants discussed the key social and political phenomena that may influence civic tech use, the relevant variables, such as the activity of local media and civil society.

Andrey Starodubtsev presented a his project focusing on the ideational dimension of regional politics in Russia.  The main methodological focus of the project is on the diachronic and synchronic textual analysis of governors speeches and writings. What ideas do regional leaders express in different contexts? In particular, how do they express the desirable status of subnational units? To answer these questions, he aims at analysing the centralist and federalist ideas in governors’ political communication using mixed-method techniques combining text mining and close reading. After the presentation, the discussion turned around the methodological issues of textual analysis, in particular how to approach different types of data and how to deal with unbalanced corpora.

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