Comparison of Portraits of the Electorate of Russian Political Parties Based on Data from Mass Polls and Data from Social Networks

This paper examines the socio-demographic portrait of the electorate of Russian political parties. In this paper, the electorate will be understood as those people who voted for a particular party, as well as a potential electorate that has activity in the social network, known as Vkontakte. Socio-demographic characteristics are defined as gender and age. Russia has a highly developed Internet network, and while studying data from social networks is not difficult, it may be extremely beneficial in understanding people's behavior and monitoring current events. To further predict election results and monitor data using social networks, it is necessary to understand the socio-demographic characteristics of social network users. If the distribution of characteristics does not match the actual situation (for example, the average age of social network users is less than in reality), further weighing of subsequent results is necessary. Thus, this work suggests that the first step is to consider the portrait of the electorate of Russian political parties in a popular social network in order to further understand the possibilities of predicting election results and monitoring through social networks. The current work examines data from the social network Vkontakte and data from the mass survey, the European social survey (ESS), for comparison.