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Electronic Resources and the Study of

Political Elites in Russia
a

Bettina Renz & Jonathan Sullivan

University of Nottingham
Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Bettina Renz & Jonathan Sullivan (2013) Electronic Resources and
the Study of Political Elites in Russia, Europe-Asia Studies, 65:10, 1898-1911, DOI:
10.1080/09668136.2013.848646
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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 65, No. 10, December 2013, 18981911

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Electronic Resources and the Study of

Political Elites in Russia

BETTINA RENZ & JONATHAN SULLIVAN

Abstract
Developments in the information society in Russia have led to the creation of an abundance of online primary
texts by political actors and institutions. This article surveys a large selection of ofcial electronic texts with
the aim of encouraging more extensive use of online sources and easing researchers navigation of Russian
politicians use of the internet. While the authors do not claim that online data can replace the insights gained
from elite interviews, the article suggests that online texts could be used more extensively as a valuable
addition to existing methods applied to the study of Russian political elites.

AS SCHOLARS OF RUSSIA KNOW VERY WELL, ELITE POLITICS has traditionally been
conducted in private and informal settings, and publically available information has not
been very useful in illuminating the important action going on behind the scenes. Given the
relative lack of reliable public data on Russian political elites, studies of political attitudes
and behaviour have tended to rely on interviews with protagonists or close observers. The
insights gained from interviews continue to be invaluable, especially when it comes to
examining complex situations in a political system where informal networks and practices
are at least as important as formal institutions (Whitmore 2010, p. 1000). Yet interviews can
also be costly, gaining access to key players is often problematic, and interview data are not
very amenable to shared use. The purpose of this article is to provide a survey of under
utilised electronic data and to introduce researchers to the potential of these resources as a
supplement to prevailing methods such as interviewing political elites. The abundance of
primary-source electronic texts, resulting from developments in the Russian information
society, and moves towards e-government, have created many opportunities to complement
and extend existing research on political elites. Just as our understanding of public attitudes
and political behaviour at the mass level in contemporary Russia has made signicant
advances due, in large part, to the availability of systematic survey data,1 we argue that
textual sources hold similar potential for analysts of elite political actors. The range of
1
For example, survey work by the Public Opinion Foundation (Fond obshchestvennoe mnenie), http://
corp.fom.ru, the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo
mneniya), http://wciom.ru, and the Levada Centre, http://www.levada.ru, have facilitated much Russian and
English-language academic research.

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/13/100189814 q 2013 University of Glasgow

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.848646

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ELECTRONIC RESOURCES AND THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ELITES 1899

online texts created by Russian political actors is greater than at any previous time. This
does not imply fully transparent governance, nor does it mean that types of political
behaviour previously conducted in informal venues are now openly visible online. However,
as political scientists in numerous contexts increasingly recognise (Sullivan & Veen 2009),
a legitimate method for studying elites is to analyse the texts that they produce. Political
texts are the concrete by-product of strategic political activity (Laver et al. 2003, p. 311),
and include all manner of spoken and written materials, from speeches, debates and
legislative addresses to electronic writings of various kinds, including blogs and tweets. As
an output of political activity, political texts are widely recognised as useful sources for
generating data on the behaviour, preferences and interactions of political actors (Slapin &
Proksch 2008).
In terms of the quantity and quality of electronic data sources, there has never been a more
fruitful time for conducting empirical research on Russian politics. Use of the internet in
Russia has grown rapidly over the past decade,2 and the development of the information
society was a central aspect in President Dmitrii Medvedevs modernisation campaign.
Both Medvedev and his predecessor and successor, Vladimir Putin, have expressed the
opinion that developing information technology was imperative for the countrys economic
competitiveness. Within this context, the nine-year Electronic Russia (Elektronnaya
Rossiya) programme was launched by the federal government in 2002, with the goal of
establishing an e-government infrastructure, providing internet services to citizens and
improving the transparency of state institutions (McHenry & Borisov 2006, pp. 1065 66).
As a result of this initiative, all Russian state structures from the federal level down to the
municipal level are now connected online, and have made a wealth of resources available to
citizens and researchers. Medvedev repeatedly called on politicians to commit to improving
the quality of information provided online, describing ofcials who treated websites as
merely decorative trimmings as unt to act in positions of responsibility (Medvedev
2009). The visibility and quality of online content quickly improved in reaction (Nocetti
2011, p. 9). The implementation of Electronic Russias goals has not been straightforward
and the achievements so far have not been without criticism. Bureaucratic obstacles and
resistance on the ground, as well as a lack of expertise, have meant that the quality and
quantity of online information made available by diverse state institutions continues to vary
dramatically (Baigarova 2010). However, Russian governmental websites look very much
like those in many other countries of the world and to dismiss them as a Potemkin Village,
erected to give the appearance of democracy, would be erroneous (McHenry & Borisov
2006, p. 1092). In some aspects of online communication, Russia compares favourably with
consolidated democracies. For instance, a recent study found that the percentage of Russian
regional governors maintaining a blog far exceeded that of their counterparts in Germany,
the UK, the US and Canada (Top 2012). Our analysis of 759 Russian politicians and
ofcials3 similarly reveals considerable engagement with new and social media platforms
(see Table 1). Although these practices are increasingly recognised as an important window

2
While only 2% of the population were regular internet users in 2000, this proportion increased to over
40% by 2010, available at: http://www.internetworldstats.com/euro/ru.htm, accessed 2 July 2011.
3
Namely, 34 ofcials employed in the Ofce of the President or Kremlin (including the President), 26
ofcials in the ofce of the Prime Minister (including the Prime Minister), the 83 regional governors, 166
Senators in the Federation Council or upper house, and 450 deputies in the State Duma or lower house.

1900

BETTINA RENZ AND JONATHAN SULLIVAN

TABLE 1
RUSSIAN OFFICIALS ONLINE MEDIA BY INSTITUTION (% TOTAL MEMBERSHIP)

Institution
Kremlin
Prime minister
Governors
Upper House
Lower House

Homepage

Blog

Facebook

Twitter

Live journal

5.8
0
37.4
9.6
26.7

5.8
7.7
42.2
1.8
4.7

2.9
3.8
1.2
0
0.7

26.5
30.8
38.6
3.6
9.3

20.6
7.7
20.5
0.6
6.7

34
26
83
166
450

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Source: Authors; as of September 2011.

onto Russian political communications, there has been very little research into the subject to
date (Top 2012).
Given the scale of the online ecology in Russia, we do not provide an exhaustive survey of
all the electronic resources available and extensive interpretation of online materials and
their potential effects is beyond the scope of the article. However, in providing some
signposts for Russia scholars and to indicate, where appropriate, how similar material has
been utilised for research in different contexts, we hope to stimulate further interest in
electronic data created by political actors and what these can add to the study of elite politics
in Russia. The article will focus on a number of major political institutions in Russia
starting with a survey of online sources and texts pertaining to the executive organs of power
(Ofce of the President, the prime minister and government ministries), the online archives
of the legislature (State Duma and Federation Council) and the resources relating to regional
politics.
The executive
The Ofce of the President
Given the centrality of the presidency in contemporary Russia, much deliberation on elite
politics has understandably focused on this actor and institution. Scholars have focused
especially on the impact of the powerful executive on the ability of other political
institutions to inuence the course of politics in contemporary Russia, that is, on the
consequences of super-presidentialism on the prospects for democracy (Fish 2000;
Ishiyama & Kennedy 2001). As a result, many studies aimed at providing macro-level
conceptualisations, focusing on questions such as how do we sum up the Russian regime
under Putin and Medvedev? or what kind of politicians are Putin or Medvedev? (Bacon &
Renz 2006). That the super-presidential system contributed much to Russias failure in
fullling early post-Soviet era expectations of making a successful transition to a liberal
democratic regime is largely accepted. However, analysts have also pointed to the often
contradictory nature of the Russian leadership and regime, which displays features that are
both reformist and reactionary (Sakwa 2008, p. 879). The quest for conceptualisations of
contemporary Russia is essential for our understanding of the political system and regime,
but it has meant that addressing questions on a lower order that could help explain such
contradictions (such as those regarding policy content and the reasons for policy decisions
made by the president in specic circumstances) have sometimes been neglected. We do not

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ELECTRONIC RESOURCES AND THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ELITES 1901

question the necessity of looking at the bigger picture, but we suggest that systematic
empirical research into the presidents (and other Russian politicians) rhetoric could
enhance our understanding of the regime and its policies and, ultimately, feed back into
macro-level explanations.
Although analysts largely agree that informal practices and procedures are important for
understanding contemporary Russian politics (Ledeneva 2006), there is a perception that
public pronouncements and speech acts do also matter. Much attention is paid, as a rule, to
the Russian presidents annual state of the nation address (Urban & Khestanov 2011), as
well as to key texts created by incumbents, such as Putins autobiographical First Person
(Ot pervogo litsa) (2000) and Medvedevs Go Russia! (Rossiya vpered!) manifesto.4
Scholars have utilised the study of presidential discourse and narratives in various ways in
order to draw out motivations, worldview and inconsistencies with the aim of providing
explanatory, critical and predictive insights into [the] polity (Bacon 2012, p. 769). Yet,
despite this interest, there has been little effort, for example, to study Russian presidents
political pronouncements over time, perhaps because of the perceived lack of data and,
possibly, lack of awareness of the tools required to analyse them. The Kremlin website
provides many valuable resources, including a database of speeches.5 The Kremlin website
is also one of the few cited in this article that provides professional English translations for
almost all of the documents published.6 The searchable database covering Medvedevs time
in ofce holds close to 6,000 texts, many of which are verbatim transcripts of speeches and
other public performances, interviews and press conferences.7 Medvedevs major speeches
and public appearances are also accessible in the form of more than 600 audio les and 700
video les accessible for download on the website.8 Since August 2009, videos have been
posted on the Kremlins ofcial You Tube channel which, according to statistics provided by
You Tube, has attracted a respectable audience.9 More than 18,000 documents are also
stored in a searchable archive covering both of Putins presidential terms back to 1999.10
The presidential database is updated daily and offers a virtually unbroken record of
presidential pronouncements for more than a decade. The Kremlin websites advanced
search function allows researchers to search not only the collection of transcripts and
speeches, but also the catalogue of all ofcial documents signed by the president (such as
federal laws and presidential decrees) and the catalogue of telegrams sent.11 The
comprehensive collection of resources housed by the presidential website was in part driven
by the centrality of information technology in Medvedevs modernisation drive.
Furthermore, Medvedev certainly practised what he preached. The Kremlin website linked
4
Medvedevs Go Russia! manifesto on his visions for the countrys political and economic development
was rst published on the liberal newspaper Gazetas website in September 2009. The full text is available at:
http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/298, accessed 2 July 2011.
5
www.kremlin.ru, accessed 18 May 2012.
6
http://eng.kremlin.ru/, accessed 18 May 2012.
7
http://kremlin.ru/search, accessed 18 May 2012.
8
http://kremlin.ru/audio; http://kremlin.ru/video, accessed 18 May 2012.
9
http://www.youtube.ru/user/kremlin, accessed 18 May 2012.
10
http://archive.kremlin.ru/, accessed 18 May 2012.
11
http://oldsearch.kremlin.ru/kremlin_ru/, accessed 18 May 2012. Elsewhere, similar online archives have
been used, for example, to study the policy position of the President of the Republic of China, Chen Shui-bian.
Analysing more than 2,000 of his speeches with the help of computer-assisted content analysis the research
assessed his position on Taiwanese independence over time and uncovered ndings that signicantly
challenged previous studies on the same subject (Sullivan & Lowe 2010).

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BETTINA RENZ AND JONATHAN SULLIVAN

to a Twitter account covering ofcial Kremlin news (@KremlinRussia_E) and Medvedevs

own Twitter feed (@MedvedevRussiaE), which recorded his activities in a direct and
personal style. Both feeds averaged daily activity and by July 2013 had around 110,000 and
650,000 followers, respectively. Medvedev also maintained a video blog from October
2008, whose entries were published both on the Kremlin website and on the Livejournal
platform.12 By July 2013 the blog contained 378 entries and was followed by more than
16,000 readers. In the short video entries recorded specically for the blog, Medvedev
expressed his views on subjects as diverse as nuclear safety, foreign direct investment and
alcoholism amongst children. Readers were encouraged to comment on the blog posts and
some entries on Livejournal attracted approaching 1,000 comments.13
A nal presidential resource worth noting is the State tab on the Kremlin website.14
Here readers can nd links to information about lesser known (and lesser researched)
institutions working in support of the executive, such as the Presidential Administration, the
State Council, the Security Council, presidential commissions and presidential councils.
Information on the tasks, working schedule, composition and membership (including short
biographies), as well as a news section, is available for each institution. The State Council
also provides transcripts of meetings with links to additional documents and material.15
From the 13 presidential commissions and 12 presidential councils in June 2011, the
Commission for Economic Modernisation and Technological Development understandably
had the biggest internet presence. The Commission maintains its own ofcial website where
a multitude of information is made available, including full transcripts and video recordings
of the Commissions meetings.16
The Prime Ministers Ofce and Government
With the exception of Evgenii Primakov, who was already well known for his foreign policy
thinking when he became prime minister for an eight month term in September 1998
(Pushkov 1998), the political views of Russian prime ministers have not really been the
subject of academic enquiry. Throughout much of the post-Soviet era prime ministers have
taken a subordinate position in the system of executive authority (White 2011). Although
the parliament has made use of its constitutional powers to inuence presidential decisions
on government formation in some instances, the tenure of prime ministers tended to be cut
short if the post-holder emerged as a potential rival to the president (Morgan-Jones &
Schleiter 2004; Shevchenko 2005). The political standing of the prime minister changed
dramatically when Putin was appointed to the post following the end of his second
presidential term in 2008. President Medvedev wielded substantial constitutional powers,
including the right to dismiss the prime minister (although such a scenario was unthinkable).
However, the political capital Putin brought to his new position meant that the country came
to be governed to some degree like a parliamentary republic, a development that Richard
12

http://kremlin.ru/video/blog; http://blog-medvedev.livejournal.com/, accessed 24 July 2013.

For a more detailed analysis of Medvedevs video blog, see Top (2012).
14
http://state.kremlin.ru/, accessed 18 May 2012.
15
http://state.kremlin.ru/state_council, accessed 18 May 2012.
16
http://www.i-russia.ru/sessions/reports/; http://www.i-russia.ru/sessions/sessions_video, accessed 18
May 2012. Whilst full transcripts were available for all 25 meetings of the Commission by July 2011, the
video recordings in some instances only show Medvedevs opening and/or closing remarks.
13

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ELECTRONIC RESOURCES AND THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ELITES 1903

Sakwa calls a para-constitutional innovation (2008, p. 890). Although many observers
initially expected Medvedev to act as little more than a puppet for the Putin regime, the new
power constellation became known as the tandem, where both actors wielded considerable
power (Ryabov 2008; Hale & Colton 2010).
With Putins re-election as president the importance of the post of prime minister as an
institution has arguably decreased and could diminish further if Medvedev is replaced with a
lesser-known candidate in the future. In the meantime, however, systematic studies of the
prime ministers political pronouncements have the potential to shed light on important
questions such as the continuity of his views, the extent of cooperation or disagreement
between president and prime minister, and the future potential, if any, of the tandem. For a
study of Putins political utterances over time the Kremlin website archive provides access
to speeches and performances up until 2008. The site for materials from 2008 to 2012 is the
ofcial website of the prime ministers ofce and the website of the Russian government.17
Information available on these sites is not comparable to the wealth of materials available on
the Kremlin website. They are more difcult to navigate and links to social media sites are
conspicuously absent by comparison. However, the events section on the prime ministers
ofce website allows readers to access information on the prime ministers activities,
including transcripts of speeches and records of meetings with government ministers.18
These materials are updated and arranged on a day-by-day basis, and are navigable via a
calendar function. Although Putin did not maintain a video blog, Twitter feed or the
like, a points of view section gave thematic access to his position as prime minister on
key questions ranging from the countrys historical legacy to international relations.19
An advanced search function eases the collection of systematic sets, for example, of prime
ministerial speeches and texts on specic issues.20
The ofcial government website (a separate portal from the prime ministers website)
includes a searchable database of almost 5,000 documents signed by the government since
2008.21 The entire document collection can also be accessed in chronological order.22 The
sites personalities section provides useful information (date of tenure, governmental
responsibilities, biographical data) for all 26 members and ministers in the Russian
government. A chronicle (khronika) for each government ofcial gives direct access to
documents relating to them, including transcripts of government meetings in which they
spoke. The entries for Russias 17 federal ministers link to the websites of the respective
ministries that they lead.23 While all federal ministries, including federal services and
agencies concerned with national security, have maintained websites for several years (Renz
2005), we have observed substantial improvements in recent times. Within the framework of
federal programmes to develop e-government and the information society, considerable
resources have been allocated to ministries to develop new websites and to exploit the
internet more effectively (Susarov 2010). While previous versions of the websites, for
example, of the Ministry of Defence and the Federal Security Service (FSB), used to contain
17

http://premier.gov.ru/; http://government.ru/, accessed 10 July 2011.

http://premier.gov.ru/events/, accessed 10 July 2011.
19
http://premier.gov.ru/points/, accessed 10 July 2011.
20
http://premier.gov.ru/search/, accessed 10 July 2011.
21
http://government.ru/documents/, accessed 10 July 2011.
22
http://government.ru/gov/, accessed 11 July 2011.
23
http://government.ru/gov/, accessed 11 July 2011.
18

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1904

BETTINA RENZ AND JONATHAN SULLIVAN

little up-to-date or systematic information, recent investments have resulted in professional

looking user friendly portals with fairly comprehensive resources.
The website Ofcial Russia (Otsialnaya Rossiya) is particularly useful as a portal for
easy access to the ofcial servers of central state institutions and ministries.24 Its section on
federal executive authorities presents a straightforward list of more than 50 internet
addresses for all federal ministries, services and agencies, including that of the FSB and
even such obscure security agencies as the Main Directorate for Special Programmes under
the President (GUSP).25 While the design features and scale of available materials varies, all
of these websites have a minimal offering of a search function, a database of laws and
documents regulating their activities, information on structure and leadership, and a news
section with a collection of interviews and/or speeches by ofcial representatives of the
institution. A number of ministries and other state agencies even make use of social media
sites and provide links to their ofcial pages on Facebook (Ministry for Agriculture;
Ministry for Natural Resources and the Environment), the Russian social networking site
VKontakte (Ministry of the Interior), Twitter feeds (Ministry for Emergency Situations
MChS, Ministry for Education and Science; Ministry of Finance) and blogs (Director of the
Federal Control of the Drug Trade).
The legislature and Federal Assembly
The State Duma
There is substantial interest in comparative studies of legislative behaviour focusing on the
political preferences and subsequent behaviour of legislators. Since the rst parliamentary
elections in post-Soviet Russia in 1993, legislative behaviour within the Russian context has
also been studied widely. As the Assemblys chamber that is directly elected and also the
site of party political activities,26 scholars have focused predominantly on legislative
behaviour in the State Duma. The Russian parliament has been a relatively marginal actor in
the policy process vis-a`-vis the executive, and increasingly so since the further centralisation
and personalisation of power over the past decade. However, if we are to understand the
limits and costs of presidential control over the political sphere, the study of such institutions
is important for a nuanced understanding of how the Russian state works (Whitmore 2010,
pp. 10008). Moreover, although executive-sponsored legislation usually passes smoothly,
this is not always the case (Remington 2008, p. 979). Due to the availability of roll-call
voting data for Duma deputies, Russia scholars, like their counterparts in the US and
Europe, have generally tended to focus on voting behaviour, rather than legislative
speeches, as a way of analysing political behaviour and ideological preferences (Haspel
1998; Shevchenko & Golosov 2001; Chaisty 2007; Remington 2008; Thames 2010).
In order to capture the inuence of informal practices on the policy process in contemporary
Russia, moreover, some researchers have used in-depth interviewing as a means to study
the behaviour and attitudes of legislators (Ostrow 1996, 1998; Whitmore 2010). Some
24

http://gov.ru/, accessed 24 July 2013.

http://gov.ru/main/ministry/isp-vlast44.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
26
The second chamber of Russias Federal Assemblythe Federation Councilwas directly elected only
in 1993. Subsequently its members have been selected by different means. Party factionalism in the
Federation Council is not permitted.
25

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ELECTRONIC RESOURCES AND THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ELITES 1905

transcripts of Russian parliamentary sessions have been used in prior qualitative-based
estimates of the political preferences of parliamentarians (Morgan-Jones & Schleiter 2004;
Shevel 2011), and there is much scope for using this resource more extensively. But there
are also, as yet, unexplored opportunities for quantitative textual studies.27
The State Dumas website is regularly updated and features multiple searchable databases
and is a useful source of information on the legislative process and legislative behaviour.28 It
provides a database of statistics relating to the legislative process, the texts of parliamentary
inquiries, and a searchable database of draft bills.29 Information is provided for more
than 25,000 laws and other acts adopted by the Federal Assembly dating back to 1994.30
Of particular interest is the database of transcripts, which provides comprehensive access to
the full, verbatim reports of all plenary sessions dating back to 1994.31 An advanced search
function permits researchers to rene their search of transcripts with a wide combination of
terms and parameters.32 The systematic analysis of these rich textual sources has the
potential to deliver reliable data, for example, on political preferences, issue salience, and
measures of cooperation and conict in political interaction in the Russian legislature.
As argued elsewhere within the context of the EU Council this could usefully supplement
previous work based on voting data and interviews (Sullivan & Selck 2007).
Information on the Dumas 450 deputies can be accessed in alphabetical order, and
arranged by political faction and committee.33 Entries for each deputy provide biographical
information, committee membership and links to a list of laws they initiated as well as to
transcripts of parliamentary sessions in which they spoke. If a deputy maintains a personal
homepage, links to this are also provided. The same set of materials can be accessed for
deputies of previous Duma convocations dating back to 1994, via the websites history
tab.34 In addition to information published on the Dumas ofcial website, numerous
legislators use social media tools, prompting interesting areas of enquiry and an additional
source of data. In December 2010 the Russian broadsheet Vedomosti published a list of
Duma deputies (and other state ofcials) blogs, microblogs and social network accounts
with direct links to the respective sources.35 The effects these methods of communication
may be having on representative constituent relationships in Russia and elsewhere are far
from clear and are not the focus of this article. However, we should not underestimate their
value. Elsewhere, researchers have found that legislators are using Web 2.0 tools to address
substantive political issues and, regardless of brevity, should be treated as seriously as more
27
Elsewhere, researchers have successfully conducted systematic analyses of similar texts with the help of
computer-assisted content analysis. Using software packages such as Wordscores or Wordsh, for example,
policy positions of parliamentarians have been reliably identied in the contexts of the EU, the US and
Germany (Benoit et al. 2005; McGuire & Vanberg 2005; Slapin & Proksch 2008; Proksch & Slapin 2009). As
these techniques are non-language specic, similar systematic analyses of textual sources studies could be
conducted in the Russian context.
28
http://www.duma.gov.ru/, accessed 11 July 2011.
29
http://www.duma.gov.ru/legislative/statistics/; http://www.duma.gov.ru/representative/interpellations/;
http://www.duma.gov.ru/systems/law/, accessed 11 July 2011.
30
http://duma.consultant.ru/, accessed 11 July 2011.
31
http://transcript.duma.gov.ru/, accessed 11 July 2011.
32
http://www.cir.ru/duma/, accessed 11 July 2011.
33
http://www.duma.gov.ru/structure/deputies/; http://www.duma.gov.ru/structure/factions/; http://www.
duma.gov.ru/structure/committees/, accessed 11 July 2011.
34
http://www.duma.gov.ru/about/history/, accessed 11 July 2011.
35
http://www.vedomosti.ru/special/deputies-communications.shtml, accessed 24 July 2013.

1906

BETTINA RENZ AND JONATHAN SULLIVAN

formal expressions (Sullivan 2010; Sullivan & Cheon 2011). Until recently our primary
access to the thoughts of Duma deputies was from journalists reports, mediated sound-bites
or our own occasional interviews. Today, new means of communication allow us to access
an almost continuous stream of thoughts, comments, musings and reections.

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The Federation Council

The Federation Council is Russias second chamber of parliament, where 166 senators
represent Russias 83 federal subjects. The 1993 Constitution gave the Federation Council
signicant powers, as it can consider and reject legislation approved by the State Duma and
has to approve decisions on war and peace. Unlike the State Duma, the upper chamber
cannot be dissolved by the President. Given the constitutional importance of its tasks, the
Federation Council has attracted surprisingly little academic attention as a political
institution and site for studying legislative behaviour. This is partially due to the fact that
compared to the State Duma it is relatively closed to outsiders (for example, voting data for
individual senators are rarely made public). Moreover, following changes to the selection
process of senators in 2000, the Federation Council is generally seen to have lost much of its
independence as an actor in policy making with its voting majorities heavily shaped by the
presidential administration. Having said this, while it is true that the Federation Council
today approves legislation supported by the government most of the time, there are also
exceptions. So far, there has been little more than speculation about the reasons for these
rejections and there seems to be ample scope for more detailed studies of senators political
behaviour and preferences (Remington 2003, p. 669). In May 2011 President Medvedev
hinted at the possibility of a future return to a directly elected upper chamber.36 Any move
towards making the Federation Council more accountable will certainly reinvigorate
interest in the institution in the future.
Although information provided on the Federation Councils website is less extensive than
that offered by the State Duma it nonetheless makes available a wealth of materials for
studying the political beliefs and preferences of its senators in quite some depth.37 As there
is no comprehensive information on votes cast by individual senators, analyses of voting
behaviour have not been an option for researchers interested in the upper chamber.
As mentioned above, however, in other contexts written and spoken texts have been
treated as data to study political preferences. As is the case with the State Duma,
parliamentary speeches appear to remain an under-utilised resource in the case of the
Russian Federation Council as well. Its website links to a comprehensive database of
Federation Council sessions dating back to 1994.38 A wealth of material can be downloaded
for almost 300 such sessions. Crucially, there are full transcripts (many of these are up to
several hundred pages in length) and, from 1999 onwards, video recordings of each session.
The website also stores the full, verbatim reports of parliamentary hearings since 2004,
which can be downloaded as word documents.39 There are about 25 of these hearings per
year and the detailed transcripts are up to 100 pages long.
36
Medvedev Does Not Rule Out Emergence of Other System of Forming FC, Itar-Tass news agency, 18
May 2011, available at: http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c152/145016.pdf, accessed 2 July 2011.
37
http://www.council.gov.ru, accessed 11 July 2011.
38
http://www.council.gov.ru/lawmaking/sf/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
39
http://www.council.gov.ru/events/parliament/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.

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The website gives access to the archives of the Federation Councils Russian-language
publications, Parlamentskoe obozrenie and Vestnik Soveta Federatsii, both from 2005.40
Analiticheskii vestnik, downloadable back to 1994, is another rich resource containing
interviews, transcripts of speeches and articles by individual senators.41 Each bulletin
focuses on a specic topic of interest to the Russian Federation, ranging from cyber
terrorism to the environment. Entries for individual senators can be accessed either
alphabetically or by region, for biographical data, committee membership and contact
information.42 An advanced search function enables searches of specic sections of content,
allowing researchers, for example, to search for individual senators contributions to
parliamentary sessions and hearings.43
Politics in Russias regions
Due to the size of the Russian Federation and the vast number of its administrative units and
subdivisions, we can only provide a glimpse of the wealth of electronic resources available
to researchers interested in political behaviour at the regional and local level. Russias 83
federal subjects are divided into 521 city units and 1,790 municipal units. At the lowest
administrative level these units are split further into 1,733 city districts and 19,585 rural
districts (Ross 2010, p. 167). Since the rise of Putin to political prominence, the nature of
centre regional relations in Russia has changed signicantly. During the Yeltsin era these
relations were characterised by an asymmetry that allowed inuential regional governors
and those in charge of wealthy federation subjects in particular, to negotiate a higher level of
autonomy on a bilateral basis. As a part of his drive to strengthen the power vertical, Putin
sought to scale back regional autonomy and the inuence of powerful governors when he
was elected president in 2000. Institutional changes included abolishing governors ex
ofcio representation in the Federation Council and reverting to a system of appointment,
rather than popular election of governors (Blakkisrud 2011, p. 367).44 The division of
Russian territory into seven large administrative districts headed by envoys appointed by the
president was another reform aimed at reasserting central control (Petrov 2002).
There is little doubt that the Kremlins control over the regions has been tightened over
the last decade. However, it is clear that there are limits to this recentralisation of power and
concluding that the centre established complete control over the regions would be an
oversimplication (Chebankova 2005). Some scholars have even argued that attempts to
impose central dominance over the regions resulted in the opposite effect: the
marginalisation of regional political forces that had established themselves over the past
two decades has caused opposition and even open conict with the centre in some cases
(Moses 2010; Petrov 2010). In spite of the growing dominance of the pro-Kremlin
United Russia Party in elections at the federal level, it has not been as successful in
extending its authority in the regions (Reuter 2010; Slider 2010). While the future direction
40
http://www.council.gov.ru/inf_ps/parlisurvey/index.html; http://council.gov.ru/publications_sf/
publisher1/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
41
http://www.council.gov.ru/inf_sl/bulletin/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
42
http://www.council.gov.ru/staff/members/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
43
http://www.council.gov.ru/search/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.
44
Regional governors were appointed by the president from 1991 to 1996. They were elected from 1996 to
2003 and the system of appointments was reintroduced in 2004.

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1908

BETTINA RENZ AND JONATHAN SULLIVAN

of centre regional relations in Russia is difcult to predict, it is clear that developments at

the regional and local levels will continue to inuence Russian politics at the federal level.
Thanks to prior research conducted on regional politics we know much about local elections
and the background of governors, including their relationship with the ruling regime.
Regional public attitudes and political behaviour on the individual level have also been
studied (Konitzer 2006; Moses 2008; Golosov 2011). Probably due to the practicalities of
collecting appropriate data, the political pronouncements and preferences of governors have
rarely been studied in comparative perspective. It is good news for researchers then, that
regional institutions today maintain a multitude of resources on their websites, providing the
opportunity for cross-regional studies.
The Federation Councils website serves as a comprehensive portal to a wealth of
electronic resources relating to Russias 83 regions. Federation subjects can be accessed in
alphabetical order to view basic information on each regions administration and legislature,
with links to their ofcial websites. From here, there are links to the websites of
administrative subdivisions down to the district level.45 As can be expected, the quality and
quantity of the information varies considerably, with governors and local executives sites
tending to be more extensive and professional than those of local legislatures.
At the top end of the scale of quality and quantity are the ofcial websites of the Moscow
city government and Duma.46 The Moscow city government provides a searchable database
of over 20,000 ofcial documents, including mayoral decrees, resolutions and agreements
dating back to 1996.47 The mayors page includes a list of his interviews and the press
service offers a variety of verbatim reports, including transcripts of government meetings.48
The website links to the ofcial sites of Moscows ten administrative districts which, in turn,
link to the websites of the city boroughs they oversee (125 boroughs in total).49 An
unfortunate drawback of the Moscow governments site is the fact that a new version was
created with the arrival of the current mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, in October 2010.
Although there is a link to the website of his predecessor, Yurii Luzhkov, we encountered
numerous technical difculties accessing Luzhkovs online archives.50 The Moscow City
Dumas website, in addition to information on deputies and political factions, has several
searchable databases, such as legal acts adopted dating back to 1994, statements back to
1996, and transcripts of parliamentary sessions back to 2000.51 The websites of other
regional executives and legislatures are often less comprehensive but they do, as a rule,
provide lists of speeches and interviews by governors and links to the archives of local
newspapers and publications.
All presidential envoys in Russias seven federal districts maintain websites that can be
accessed via the Otsialnaya Rossiya (Ofcial Russia) portal.52 While the information on
these sites is patchy, they provide background information on the presidential envoys and
45

http://www.council.gov.ru/subject_RF/sub/index.html, accessed 11 July 2011.

http://www.mos.ru; http://www.duma.mos.ru/, accessed 11 July 2011.
47
http://www.mos.ru/documents/, accessed 11 July 2011.
48
http://www.mos.ru/authority/mayor/; http://www.mos.ru/press-center/transcripts/, accessed 11 July
2011.
49
http://www.mos.ru/authority/structure/, accessed 11 July 2011.
50
http://old.mos.ru/, accessed 11 July 2011.
51
http://www.duma.mos.ru/zakon.shtml; http://www.duma.mos.ru/stn.shtml, accessed 11 July 2011.
52
http://www.gov.ru/main/page3.html, accessed 24 July 2013.
46

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ELECTRONIC RESOURCES AND THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ELITES 1909

their activities, including a collection of speeches and interviews. In some cases, such as the
Siberian Federal District and the Volga Federal District, minutes of the meetings of district
councils (these include the governors of federation subjects located in the district) are also
available for download.53 As is the case at the federal level, the use of social media by
political elites is a growing phenomenon in regional politics. Although Russian governors
are no longer elected and therefore not subject to the pressure of seeking competitive
advantages through their communications with voters, recent research found that 35%
maintained a blog (Top 2012) (see also Table 1 above). According to the internet portal
goslyudi.ru, which publishes a regularly updated list of blogs maintained by Russian
politicians and public gures, at least 38 mayors and heads of local municipalities were
blogging by July 2011.54 Presidential envoys in federal districts appear to be the least active
in this eld with only Igor Kholmanskikh (@polpred2012), envoy to the Urals
Administrative District, and Viktor Ishaev (@news_ishaev), in the Far Eastern
Administrative District, maintaining active Twitter accounts by July 2013.
Conclusion
Research on public attitudes and voting behaviour has beneted enormously from open
scholarly access to systematically collected, reliable data. Research on elite political
behaviour in Russia could similarly benet from supplementary datasets generated by
analysing some of the abundant electronic primary sources now available. The large variety
of online sources and texts created by political institutions and actors at all levels of ofce
has opened the possibility, for example, of studying the political pronouncements and
ideological positions of politicians over time and across regions, as well as the opportunity
of studying political actors who have not previously been the subject of detailed academic
enquiry. The emergence of elite mass communications via the internet naturally prompts
many important research questions relating to the restructuring of information ows and
power relations. Although it is outside the scope of this article to address these questions, we
hope to have demonstrated that there is abundant primary source information available
online for students of different aspects of elite politics in Russia. Many of the online
resources discussed above, such as speeches, transcripts and blogs, can be utilised as an
additional source for qualitative studies of elite politics, for quantitative content-analytical
studies, or, with additional processing, automated text analysis. While online electronic
resources will not, and should not, replace the insights derived from prevailing interviewbased methods, they are a useful addition to the toolbox for researchers seeking to gain a
nuanced understanding of Russian politics in all its complexity.
University of Nottingham
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