MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE PARTIES’ ACTIVITY DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN AND ITS IMPACT ON THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTIONS TO THE STATE DUMA OF THE VII CONVOCATION (on the example of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia)

In this article, within the framework of the study of the election’s PR-campaigns of the Russian parliamentary parties to the State Duma of the VII convocation, the authors conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the presence of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) in the Russian-language media during the campaign period. Representatives of the LDPR party during the campaign and after it focused on the significant role of the media in achieving a successful result for the party in the election, including comparison with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). The authors compare own results of the analysis with the results of voting in the regions and with the most frequent mention of the party in the media. Further, we determined the degree of their correlation with the results of the voting, as well as with the activity in the media during this period of the Communist party and its results in the elections of the lower chamber of the Russian State Duma in 2016. Having analyzed the representation of the LDPR in the media during the campaign period, the authors concluded that it did not differ in interesting and non-standard information narratives. The tonality of reports about the party was not more positive than the tonality of materials about the Communist party. The results of the study, obtained with the help of the monitoring system “Medialogy”, have shown that the overall frequency of the party’s mentioning and the activity of the party in generating messages about it in the media have had no connection with the results of the vote. This confirms the opinion of experts that the results of voting in the election to the State Duma largely depended on the activity of the field campaigns of the parties and the so-called elite agreements - the mutual agreement on candidates when nominating in single-member districts.

Liberal Democratic Party, mass media, electoral systems, election campaign, the State Duma of the VII convocation

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