Georgy Borshchevskiy 1
What did the Speaker Say? Public Values in Russian Parliamentary Discourse and in the Public Opinion
2024,
vol. 23,
No. 3,
pp. 227–261
[issue contents]
Since the parliament is endowed with representative functions it is called upon to represent the structure of society and articulate its inherent values. The chairman (speaker) represents the leading political party, so we can consider his/her speeches in the chamber as a ruling elite’s message to citizens. We aim to identify value dominants in the discourse of the chairmen of the Russian State Duma during the 1st till the 8th convocations (1994-2023) and to search for points of its contact with the values of Russian society. The methodological framework is the integral model of values, based on the well-known theories by Geert Hofstede, Ronald Inglehart and Shalom Schwartz, adapted for content analysis of discursive texts (transcripts of the State Duma sessions) by thesaurus marker words characterizing basic values. We also use qualitative discourse analysis to identify semantic chains, the specifics of ideological articulation of marker words, and analyze the transformation of their meaning in different contexts.The stability of the models based on the frequency of use of marker words in discourse for four value groups is tested using the principal component analysis. The hypothesis is tested that the speaker’s party affiliation has lost its connection with the values they broadcast over time (such a connection was observed only during the 1st and the 2nd convocations of the State Duma). We confirmed the assumption about a value shift in discourse from collectivist values to individualistic ones during the years of the post-Soviet political transition, while a decrease in the clusters of secular-rational and traditional values. The models are verified using secondary analysis of data from public opinion pools and waves of the World Values Survey. Correlations are revealed between the frequency of mentioning values and the dynamics of respondents’ answers to questions corresponding to these values (with the exception of traditionalist values). Comparison of the models with the country’s social and economic development indicators revealed counterintuitive results indicating a nonlinear influence of the economic situation on political thinking and discursive practices. The paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical and empirical development of contemporary Russian policy in the field of values.
Keywords:
social values;
World Values Survey;
Inglehart;
Schwartz;
Geert Hofstede;
State Duma;
parliamentary discourse;
public opinion;
principal component analysis;
discourse analysis
Citation:
Borshchevskiy G. (2024) Chto skazal spiker? Tsennosti v parlamentskom diskurse i v otsenkakh rossiyan [What did the Speaker Say? Public Values in Russian Parliamentary Discourse and in the Public Opinion]. The Russian Sociological Review, vol. 23, no 3, pp. 227-261 (in Russian)