Protest reaction to the to the lawmaking of the State Duma of the Sixth convocation: Russian and international viewpoints

<p>The following research paper concerns the protest reaction to the lawmaking results of the State Duma in Russia. The topic was chosen due to the observed discrepancy in how the news are presented in Russian and foreign mass media, and in how this information is interpreted by Russian people and the citizens of other countries</p><p>The goal of the research is to indicate the relations between the major opinion formed by mass media and the people&rsquo;s protest reactions, and between Russia and foreign countries.</p><p>The tasks of the research are to:</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Evaluate the theoretical and methodological background of the topic</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Identify the displays of protest reaction in the social network</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Work out a list of parameters for evaluating the emotional condition of protest reactions for the axes of cognitive, affective and behavioural components of the attitude.</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Compare the tone of protest behaviours in Russia with those of foreign countries</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Compare the tone of protest reactions between the two Russian laws</p><p style="margin-left:53.45pt;">6.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Identify the possible relation between mass media opinion and the displays of protest reactions.</p><p>The theoretical object of the research is the attitude towards Russian laws expressed and published as the notes and comments in the Internet.</p><p>The subject are the characteristics of the expression of the attitudes toward laws</p><p>The empirical object are the English and Russian speaking Internet users providing the notes and comments.</p><p>The database was collected both automatically and manually. It is a text base which consists of short messages (up to 1100 symbols) which reflect the reaction toward the laws proposed by the State Russian Duma in 2012-2013. The data were gathered from various sources including social networks, blogs, forums and news pages. The additional database is the base of news articles from top international online newspapers.</p><p>In the course of the study the key theoretical concepts of social protest were considered, the lack of information on the concept of protest reaction and of the techniques for Internet-textual data analysis were found. The difference between the concept of protest reaction and that of just a &ldquo;reaction&rdquo; was underlined.</p><p>Several ways of coding the same information were tested for detecting the most suitable and precise one. The analysis of online news articles was held to identify the emotional context of the news and for introduction the data to the main database.</p><p>The results of the study showed that despite the fact that foreign online newspapers are more negative in their emotional mood, at the same time there is an inverse relationship of it with the emotional context of the posts and comments in the Internet.</p><p>Finally, the model was worked out to more precisely evaluate each of the text pieces simultaneously using two scales &ndash; the emotional one and the one of the three concepts of the attitude. This model can be further used in the analysis of the short texts.</p>