Diversity of identities in modern political communication (for example, the election campaign of the mayor of Moscow)

Abstract

The category of identity discovers an interesting refractive index in modern political communication. In electoral scenarios of politicians interacting with voters there are cultural practice identifiers of “their” and of “alien”. In recent years however another identifier has became noticeable, that of the differentiation of society, which is suggested and ameliorated in the article denoting the conditional term of the “nobodies”. The significance of this in electoral communications in particular, is shown in the research in media texts of one of the most recent major election campaigns - the Moscow Mayoral election campaign. For the purposes of this study a number of identifiers in the specific communications policy of these candidates for the Mayoral position were chosen and in particular the several active campaign representations of government sponsored candidates and those of the main opposition campaigns in particular, those of Sergei Sobyanin, A. Navalny and N. Levicheva. The study showed that the technology of operation of the concepts of “their” and “alien” (as well as ways of testing the identifier of “nobodies”) may vary the politicocommunicative interaction with plenty of variants. The article has noted the cases of the use of the neutral concept namely that of “nobodies”. In a study of self-perception of Russians conducted by the nonprofit research service “Environment” relying on the grading of the affiliation of our countrymen to different types of identifiers, “of drawing people” and thereafter allocating them into a separate social groups the article evidences that in this category there are included respondents calling themselves “non-Russian”, “non-believers”, “lonely”, “suffering in health”, “childless”, “unemployed”, etc. - they are all of extremely low overall value in belonging or being categorized within all the proposed survey category designations, and it is difficult to relate themselves with virtually any mentioned social clusters.