Identification of the city

From the editors: One of the key problems of the functioning of democratic institutions in the capital is due to the fact that Moscow is a city of federal significance. That is - both the city and the subject of the federation. This means that its status does not allow residents to fully implement those principles of self -government that were laid down in administrative reform at the level of municipalities. A. Dolgopolov raises the question of the specifics of the urban environment, which determines the features of political communication within the city.

The need to analyze the problems of modeling political, and in particular electoral, municipal level campaigns are caused by a number of circumstances.

Firstly, to date, in the scientific literature (except for the sociological), the features of political campaigns conducted at the level of local self-government have been practically not considered. The main focus of the attention of researchers was focused on electoral technologies and political communications as independent instruments used within the socio-political system. Moreover, their differentiation, depending on the administrative level, was practically not carried out.

Secondly, the adopted federal laws # 51-ФЗ "On the elections of deputies of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation" dated May 18, 2005, # 93-ФЗ "On Amending the Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation on Elections and Referendums and other legislative acts of the Russian Federation" of July 21, 2005, significantly transformed the electoral system of the Russian Federation and clearly divided the elections in legislative and legislative and legislative and legislative and the country Representative authorities for three types.

In accordance with these legislative acts, the formation of the State Duma (elections of the federal level) occurs according to the proportional system of representation, the formation of regional legislative assemblies (elections of the regional level) - according to a mixed system, representative bodies of local self -government (municipal level elections) - according to majority. Thus, by the end of 2005, the representative institutions of the municipal level authorities remained the only platform for the competition of political leaders, while federal and regional legislative institutions mostly became the arena of the party struggle.

Thirdly, the electoral practice shows that, as a rule, during the vote, Russians make a choice based on personal sympathies and antipathies to political leaders. At the same time, for a number of reasons, a significant part of the voters is poorly oriented in the ideological differences in parties and is practically not aware of the features of their programs. Consequently, a specific politician in the worldview continuum of the Russian at the beginning of the 21st century is much closer to his core than amorphous party formations.

Under the current conditions, it should be expected that cities will become the most favorable environment for the manifestation and development of politicians who are understandable and close to the country's population. This, in turn, will prompt party organizations that, in accordance with the updated legislation, can only be federal, seek support from municipal figures. In this way, parties will be able to secure mandates in legislative assemblies of the federal and regional levels, and city leaders - the prospects of their further career growth.

Strengthening the regional interest of party entities is confirmed by the initiative of the State Duma to amend the procedure for the appointment of governors. Deputies were proposed to make the appointment of senior officials of the constituent entities of the Federation on the proposal of parties.

The listed circumstances determine the circle of problems, the resolution of which is of priority for effective modeling and conducting political, and in particular electoral, municipal level campaigns:

- Citizens as a specific subject of political communication;
- authentic city content of political communication;
- methods and channels for the implementation of communicative functions of the policy of the municipal level;
- Features of the political sphere of the life of the city.

All these problems can be more attributed to the field of political communications. In fact, their resolution is an attempt to answer the questions: with whom, with what channels and means, in what circumstances do you have to communicate a city -scale policy for legitimate conquest and exploitation of power, for generating power relations and effective management? That is, to consider the implementation of communication models, developed in theoretical works of N. Vininer, K. Snenna and W. Uiver, G. Lasswell, M. Defler and others, in the political practice of Russian cities.

The difficulty of studying the communication of the municipal level lies in the variety of types of urban districts. On the vast territory of the Russian Federation, both cities of federal significance and regional, regional, national centers, industrial "superclobodes" (by the definition of V. Llazychev), small cities are located. The given categories, in turn, on the basis of various classification features can be divided into smaller groups. However, all of them are united by the presence of a special synthetic environment, inside which the communicative processes we are considering proceed. To designate it at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term was introduced in social psychology - the “urban environment”.

A certain time of the city was considered mainly as an economic and production unit. This point of view was especially clearly manifested in the works of domestic researchers of the Soviet period. The city was, first of all, by the industrial center, the focus of jobs and only after that the habitat. The concept of "urban environment" introduced by social psychologists turned out to be wider. It included not only material and production units, but in general all objects concentrated in a particular spatio -temporal continuum - the city as a system at a certain stage of its existence. These were classified:

- objects of the material and subject world that surround a person in everyday practice;
- Objects of the social, political and spiritual spheres of the city.

The listed components of the urban environment, as was proved in the works of K.Linch, V. Llazychev and others, influence each other, they function in the conditions of mutual determination. On the one hand, the material environment of a person, projecting in his mind, forms the image of the relevant surrounding reality. This image, in turn, receives a projection to the spiritual world of personality. On the other hand, the spiritual world of a person through the formed value-normative and information-orientation complexes is reflected in the subject world produced by him.

In their aggregate, objects of the material and subject world and objects of the social, political and spiritual plan make up the specifics of the integrity of urban education - its integrative qualities. These qualities are different from those that each of the components has separately, and often opposite to them. They can be determined as the ratio of the amount of the qualities of the elements of the system to the external conditions of its functioning. Moreover, considering the urban environment from the point of view of system analysis, it is necessary to take into account the reverse influence of the qualities of a holistic system on the specifics of its components.

The solution of the problems formulated above seems possible within the framework of the described paradigm. The urban environment leaves its mark on the subjects of political communication, and on the channels and methods of its implementation, and to a certain extent on its content. It, as an environmental environment, is a key feature on the basis of which we produce the urban level of political communication.

Citizens , as a subject of communication, are the essential part of the urban environment, its core. In their aggregate, they form the city community. By themselves, citizens for the most part are passive recipients in the communicative process. They carry out feedback with communicators mainly through the reaction to the received messages. At the same time, the city community is able to act as a full -fledged factor, in the arsenal of which there are much more instruments and possibilities of manifestation of its communicative activity.

Under the "city community", following V. Pylin, we understand "The unification of citizens related to their residence in the city: having municipal property, a local budget, an elected representative body of local self -government, as well as common interests in the independent and under its responsibility to resolve issues of local importance to ensure their life directly, through local authorities and elected representatives within the framework of current legislation" 1 . This definition provides in many ways an idealistic idea of ​​the city community. On the other hand, it accurately indicates what issues should be involved in the resolution of the townspeople.

The degree of participation of citizens in these processes determines the degree of development of the city community. The higher their involvement in the indicated aspects of city life, the more stable the existence of the city as a holistic system. On the contrary, low involvement is the cause of the increase in entropy processes in the urban environment, contributing to the qualitative transformation of the city into a summative system and an increase in the risk of its decomposition. In this regard, if we consider the urban environment one of the levels of civil society, the creation of conditions for the formation of the city community, support for civilian initiatives in municipalities is of particular importance for the development of the latter.

Thus, the efficiency of political campaigns of the city level directly depends on how much they contribute to the activation of the townspeople (that is, to bring this element of the system into an excited state) and their self -identification with the city community. The latter at the same time is of key importance. In the absence of such self -awareness, a resident of the city loses the motivation and understanding of the meaning of participation and in the elections, referenda and in political communication in general. In this case, the subjects of urban policy acquire the status of an improvised political functions and administrative powers.

The need for self -identification of citizens as a city community actualizes the issue of the authentic city of the content of political communication . It is obvious that it is it that is designed to form the actual and desired images of the urban environment in the minds of the inhabitants, combining both the reflection of the material and spiritual space of the city and the place of the carrier of this consciousness in it.

A. Panarin in the monograph "Philosophy of Politics", starting from the works of A. Tourren, distinguishes two main types of political information that are possible in the conditions of the Open Society 2 :

- descriptive (sociocultural) information - information that forms the standards of life and claims of citizens;
- prescriptive (applied, technological) information - information that serves "technological and production reconstruction".

The prevailing of the first and its active borrowing from other communities is fraught, according to the researcher, an imbalance between real capabilities and existing claims. This, in turn, leads to social stress, the formation of permanent dissatisfaction of citizens with an objective reality.

The dominance of the second, on the one hand, requires the preservation of a certain "traditional ascetic" and "isolation from sociocultural provocations", on the other hand, it allows you to easily pursue a policy of modernization and makes a social pyramid more resistant to various shocks.

Based on these provisions, A. Panarin considers the main task of political power in the field of information “not to succumb to the elements of intercultural exchange: to dose the flows of information exchange so that the circulation of applied (prescriptive) information related to real technologies exceeds the increase in general sociocultural information that generates only the revolution of 3 .

Since A. Panarin in his work considered the processes of a nationwide nature, his conclusions require some correction in the application to the practice of political communication of Russian cities. In particular, it must be borne in mind that descriptive information is spontaneously entered as a result of intercultural exchange and is spreading through the channels of nationwide and regional media. Consequently, the content of political communication of the urban level, based on a certain purpose of information, can be divided into the following blocks:

- information of applied nature, about the possible "technologies" of the development of the city, information about the current life of the city, etc.;
- information promoting the formation of city traditions;
- messages that stimulate a critical attitude to the descriptive information from outside;
- Propaganda of intracity values ​​and standards of life.

As a rule, city politicians have very insignificant resources that could be aimed at the performance of their communicative functions. This significantly limits their capabilities in the use of channels of traditional media. In addition, the current state of affairs in the mass media market allows us to talk about the insufficient influence of most regional, and even more urban, the media on the consciousness of citizens.

In these circumstances, the issue of alternative channels and methods for the implementation of political communication of the urban level is especially relevant. As a result of the transformation of the electoral legislation of the Russian Federation, which occurred in the early 2000s, some possibilities for solving it were quite clearly determined. In particular, an increase in the representative office of citizens in local governments led to a decrease in the size of the electoral districts. For example, the constituency in the elections to the Togliatti City Duma consisted of 15,000 inhabitants against the previous 30,000. In the election of a representative body in the city -Satelite Zhigulevsk - 2000 people. These conditions open up wide opportunities for the use of direct marketing (Direct Marketing) and marketing with databases (Database Marketing) 4 . American practice of using these technologies revealed their key features:

- focus on the generation of action;
- purposefulness;
- the ability to "set up";
- The measurability of the result.

The last feature is important in assessing the effectiveness of a political campaign.

As the experience of political campaigns in Russian cities shows, the most effective in modern conditions are the techniques of direct mailing and communication using various databases. In addition, despite the complexity of its implementation, their high efficiency, in particular in the elections to the State Duma in December 2003, showed oral advertising techniques ("from mouth to mouth") and impact through reference groups.

Planning of effective political companies a priori is impossible without taking into account the circumstances in which the communication process is carried out. In various models of communication, these circumstances are considered as sources of interference, noise, communication situation, etc. In this work, the features of the political sphere of the city’s life are considered as a set of external (in relation to the most communicative process) factors that influence the reproduction, transfer and perception of political information by socio-political and social subjects of the city. Given the inclusion of the city in the system of the country as a whole, it is necessary to distinguish between the features of the political sphere, determined by the external conditions of the existence of the urban system, and the features determined by the specifics of the urban environment itself.

The external conditions of the city determine the following features of the sphere of his political life:

- narrowing of the space of public policy;
- influence on the resolution of issues of local importance of the interests of party entities;
- expansion of descriptive information by national and regional media;
- the formation of a mass society, ahead of the formation of civilian;
- Mediatization of politics.

Obviously, these features are characteristic not only of city entities, but in general the entire political system of the country.

The specifics of the urban environment, as we have already said, also determines some features of the political life of the city. It should be noted that each city education can have a set of individual characteristics of the political sphere. Here we will call only those that are the most common. Among these:

- низкая вероятность сознательной обработки политической информации 5 горожанами;
- наличие возможности личного контакта политика и граждан;
- принадлежность и политических деятелей, и рядовых горожан к одной социальной группе - городскому сообществу;
- отсутствие понимания в массовом сознании круга вопросов, находящихся в ведении органов местного самоуправления.

Исходя из вышеизложенного становится очевидным наличие ряда специфических особенностей политической коммуникации местного уровня. В первую очередь эти особенности детерминированы спецификой особого пространства осуществления коммуникативной деятельности - городской средой. В сложившихся к концу 2005 г. условиях, связанных с трансформацией политической системы страны, город приобретает особое значение в осуществлении политической коммуникации и формировании гражданского общества.

Notes:

1 Пылин В.В. Местные сообщества как основа гражданского общества / Гуманитарные технологии и политический процесс в России: Сб. статей / под ред. Л.В.Сморгунова. -St. Petersburg: Publishing House of the St. Petersburg. ун-та, 2001. - С. 192.

2 См.: Панарин А.С. Философия политики. Учебное пособие для политологических факультетов и гуманитарных вузов. - М.: Новая школа, 1996. - 424 с.

3 Панарин А.С. Философия политики. Учебное пособие для политологических факультетов и гуманитарных вузов. - М.: Новая школа, 1996. - С. 376.

4 См.: Батра Р., Майер Дж., Аакер Д. Рекламный менеджмент: Пер. from English. - 5-е изд. - M.; Спб.: К.: Изд. дом "Вильямс", 2000. - 784 с.; Уэллс У., Бернет Дж., Мориарти С. Реклама: принципы и практика: Пер. from English. - Спб.: Изд-во "Питер", 1999. - 736 с.

5 Термин заимствован у Р. Пети и Дж. Качиоппо, в 80-х гг. XX century. разработавших модель вероятностной сознательной разработки информации (ВСО).