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  • Russian Political Blogs and their Subscribers: a Case Study of Blogs of Members of the Coordinating Council of the Opposition

Russian Political Blogs and their Subscribers: a Case Study of Blogs of Members of the Coordinating Council of the Opposition

Student: Pozdniakova Galina

Supervisor: Kirill A. Maslinsky

Faculty: Saint-Petersburg School of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Sociology (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2017

In this paper, a network of blogs of the members of the Coordination Council of the opposition on the platform LiveJournal is being studied. The council consisted of 45 participants belonging to different political forces. Information was used as data from public profiles of blogs and data on friendship ties between them as of November 2013. The purpose of the study is to explain the political processes associated with the formation and disintegration of political associations on the basis of an analysis of the interrelationships between political blogging. And also to analyze the structure of the audience of electoral lists and coats. The main method of research is the analysis of social networks (social network analysis). In particular, the main metrics of the CSR network were calculated: density, average distance between nodes, transitivity, reciprocity. The results of the clustering of the social network of blogs were correlated with the division of the council into factions after the elections. Additionally, based on the overlap coefficients, a distance matrix between the vertices was created between each pair of blogs. As a result, automatic clustering roughly coincided with the actual membership of political parties. Regarding the support of the audience, the electoral lists correspond well to certain readership segments, in contrast to the factions. This result may be due to the fact that, in the main, the readership is interested in the opposition topic of the blogs of the general list as a whole, while reading information about corruption, news from urban studies and culture.

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