Candidate Positioning Strategies in the 2019 Moscow City Duma Elections

The master's thesis aims to analyze candidates' political positioning in the Moscow city council election in 2019 under the conditions of restricted competition. The goal is to define the set of possible strategies of the ruling party and opposition. The research methods are quantitative content analysis (MDS, LDA) and qualitative content analysis (positional word counts approach). Tha main results are: 1) Competition in the Moscow city council election was structured by the regime cleavage. 2) The convergence of candidates' positions. The best theory to study candidates' strategies is salience theory. 3) The components of the ruling party representatives' strategy are: positioning on the regime cleavage, ways of its' deactualizing, attribution of responsibility, the most salient issues and issue ownership, the reaction on competitors' issue ownership. 4) The ruling party representatives realize the catch-all strategy. 5) The ruling party representatives may position themselves as opposition candidates when they (1) are not related to "United Russia" and (2) have a strong competitor.