A Case of Using "Emotional State" Questionnaire by Pew Research for Segmenting the Electorate of Russia

In Russia, over the past few years, the issue of electoral preferences has been particularly relevant. This is confirmed by the fact that 66% of Russians have a request for a change of the government (RBC, 2019). The importance of the study of electoral preferences entails the need to create new methods for predicting electoral behavior, since the old models make mistakes in the results. One potential problem may be incorrect voter segmentation. In Russia, demographic and socio-economic characteristics are mainly used to group the electorate, but such method does not always work. Nowadays many foreign researchers are trying to find new ways to differentiate the electorate, one of them is segmentation by emotional state. M. Weber, G. Simmel, R. Collins, J. de Rivera, T. Kemper and other researchers spoke about the fact that emotions can have a high explanatory power in relation to the people’s behavior. This study answers the question of whether the emotions of Russian citizens are connected with their political preferences or not? If so, can segmentation on emotional basis be relevant for Russia? To answer this question, an analysis of secondary data collected according to the quota strategy for the all-Russian sample.