Neither conflict, no concord: Performing ideology in contemporary Russia

Abstract

Authors interpret the results achieved by analyzing the content of Russian political parties’ manifestos that managed to enter the State Duma after 2011 and 2016 elections. Our conceptual framework is based on Immanuel Wallerstein’s assumption that only three ideologies—liberalism, conservatism and socialism — were the key ones to 20th century experience and, hence, that any particular ideology might be reduced to that list. Firstly, we build a matrix of content analysis to analyze texts of officially published political parties’ programs. As a result we could show that values at the core of any program at any stage were hybrid in nature and that there was increase in liberal rhetoric in 2016. Further we interpret the empirical results by applying both classical (M. Seliger) and modern (J. Schwartzmantel) models of ideology. By using Seliger’s conception of ideology we demonstrate that our political parties choose not to defend the coherent value core of their programs in order to fulfill ‘technical’ task of generating sufficient electoral support. Schwartzmantel’s idea that neo-liberalism as a “classical” state-oriented ideology is attacked by a plenty of non-classical, network-organized ideologies nowadays does not fit our reality, because there is no. pronounced opposition between neo-liberal and critical political discourses. Thus, we argue there is no. normative foundation either for conflict or concord among ideological projects and, moreover, that ideological struggle on the Russian political arena has left classical political domain. It requires social sciences to renew its methodological implements for analyzing ideology properly, while philosophy faces with self-description challenge. © 2020 Saint Petersburg State University. All rights reserved.