Публикации

Online social networks (OSNs) play an increasingly important role in news dissemination and consumption, attracting such traditional media outlets as TV channels with growing online audiences. Online news streams require appropriate instruments for analysis. One of such tools is topic modeling (TM). However, TM has a set of limitations (the problem of topic number choice and the algorithm instability, among others) that must be addressed specifically for the task of sociological online news analysis. In this paper, we propose a full-cycle methodology for such study: from choosing the optimal topic number to the extraction of stable topics and analysis of TM results. We illustrate it with an analysis of online news stream of 164,426 messages formed by twelve national TV channels during a one-year period in a leading Russian OSN. We show that our method can easily reveal associations between news topics and user feedback, including sharing behavior. Additionally, we show how uneven distribution of document quantities and lengths over classes (TV channels) could affect TM results.

In the early 1990s, the Russian public held overwhelmingly favorable attitudes toward the United States; in recent years, attitudes toward the United States have been overwhelmingly unfavorable. Analysts often trace this dramatic change to (1) the emergence of Russian-American conflicts such as those in former Yugoslavia and (2) Russian leaders’ attempts to escape blame for their country’s failures by attributing them to a powerful external enemy. We point to another major factor of Russian anti-Americanism that preceded the international conflicts and the government-led anti-American propaganda: (3) disillusionment, or an emotional and ideological dissatisfaction with the outcome of pro-Western reforms that started among the liberal elites and then spread among the general public. Using data from the New Russian Barometer surveys, we analyze the dynamics of attitudes toward the United States from 1993 to 2009. We find that mass disappointment in the perestroika outcomes preceded the spread of anti-Americanism in Russia and that anti-American sentiment was stronger and occurred earlier among the elite than among the mass public. Furthermore, those (especially better-educated) people who express disappointment with the outcomes of pro-Western reforms prove significantly more anti-American. Our findings illustrate a general ideological phenomenon that may explain the growth of anti-Americanism in unsuccessful democracies worldwide.

The contemporary sociological debate highlights that youth is a category of age, but actual chronological youth is hardly viewed as a space of age production. Transition studies exclude youth as a stage of age identity production, while age studies do not problematize young people's experience. This article focuses on age construction by two groups of chronologically young women. The analysis of forty qualitative interviews with fifteen- to twenty-year-old girls and thirty- to thirty-five-year-old women from Saint Petersburg shows that the concept of youth is slipping away from the biographical narratives of the informants from both age groups. Subjective adulthood experienced by young women is a goal and a value, while a young body does not prove to be a significant and available resource. At the same time, adulthood is not constructed as a set of clearly defined social characteristics but as an identity, a subjective experience, embodied adult personhood.

This chapter brings new insight to the study of young people’s activism in extreme right groups by considering their activism from a social movement theory perspective. It draws on the meta-ethnographic synthesis of findings of a cluster of ethnographic studies of radical right and patriotic movements conducted for the MYPLACE project, focusing on the emotional and affective dimensions of activism and on three case studies: the English Defence League (UK), Russian Run (Russia) and Torcida (Croatia). It considers the emotional pleasure derived from activism often expressed as going ‘wild’, feeling euphoric, or being overtaken by a physical ‘buzz’, as well as the reciprocal emotions that bind activists through feelings of solidarity and mutual support, expressed as feeling part of ‘one big family’.

This article reports evidence of misspecification of the measurement model for the index of emancipative values, a value construct used as a key explanatory variable in many important contributions to political science. It shows that the scale on which the index is measured is noninvariant across cultural zones and countries in the World Values Survey. In addition, it demonstrates that the current index composition mixes different value dimensions and their actual associations with various political outcomes, in particular the index of effective democracy. However, an analysis using a novel approximate Bayesian approach shows that at least one specific subdimension of emancipative values, known as pro-choice values, truly exists and may be validly measured and compared cross-nationally. The article also contributes to the recent discussion on whether emancipative values are a reflective or a formative construct by providing thought experiments and empirical evidence supporting the former interpretation.