Adaptation of Social Network Use as a Transparency Mechanism Applied by Russian Government Bodies

In the last 2 decades Russian government has implemented different practices oriented on the improvement of public policy. One of them is an introduction of Open Government principles, which resulted in the enactment of Transparency Standard in 2014. The assessment of public bodies’ transparency is annually provided by both Russian and foreign organizations; still, the most of these research topics are connected with the transparency of state bodies’ official websites or Open Data use. At the same time, only little attention is paid to the social network use as a transparency mechanism. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by assessing the quality of Russian federal public bodies’ presence on social networks, as well as by giving some general recommendations on this presence. The pages of 44 federal government bodies in 6 social media were examined in this study.