The next rating of the city elite has been compiled

Last week, the marketing communications agency "Marko" completed a sociological study "St. Petersburg: elite dimension (barometer of opinions of St. Petersburg leaders)." This is the third organization after the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Gallup St. Petersburg company that is looking for the most influential people in the city.
The founder of the fashion for compiling ratings of the St. Petersburg elite is Tatyana Protasenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Two years ago, Ms. Protasenko compiled a list of 460 names of people who could, to one degree or another, be called influential. Moreover, the St. Petersburg residents were separated from the “Moscow St. Petersburg residents.” Those on this list were not able to participate in the survey. The degree of influence was determined by experts - politicians, businessmen, analysts, media and PR representatives.
The Gallup company has a different methodology: VIPs, without dividing into St. Petersburg and Muscovites, themselves determined the most influential of them.
A newcomer to the elite research market, the marketing communications agency MarCo, decided to determine not only the ten most influential people in the city, but also to find out “what the elite are thinking about today.” The scientific director of the project “St. Petersburg: Elite Dimension” is the head of the Department of Communication Theory of the Faculty of Journalism of St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Dmitry Gavra.
During the study, 109 people were interviewed - representatives of the political-administrative, financial-economic and cultural-educational elites of the city. The research method is a face-to-face interview at the respondent’s place of work.
First of all, the study participants were asked to “self-identify”: to answer the question whether they consider themselves to be among the elite of St. Petersburg. Those who consider themselves influential people in the city, and those who do not feel like such. It turned out almost equally - about 30%.
The respondents rated their level of awareness of what is happening “in the highest echelons of St. Petersburg” as follows: 8 points out of 10 possible - 24%, 9 - 29% and 10 - 32%.
For example, those whom the study authors classified as the political and administrative elite were best informed about the situation surrounding the construction of the ring road - 71.1%. Representatives of the economic and cultural elite were only 30% aware of the situation with the construction of the ring road. It is curious that the authors of the study could not explain such a difference in the degree of awareness (more than double). They thought she was "pretty amazing."
The study concludes with a table entitled “Assessment of the influence of members of the St. Petersburg elite on the development of the political situation in the city.” Unlike Ms. Protasenko and the Gallup company, the MarCo agency did not offer its respondents a ready-made list of VIPs. They had to name the influential people of St. Petersburg themselves, and then evaluate the degree of their influence in the city on a 5-point scale, where 1 is the minimum score, 5 is the maximum.
But, despite this, the top twenty leaders from MarCo turned out to be very similar to the top twenty leaders from Ms. Protasenko and Gallup. It included the director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky (11th place), the head of Lenenergo Andrei Likhachev (3rd place), the spouses of the governor and presidential envoy Irina Yakovleva (5th place) and Natalya Chaplina (18th place) ), Plenipotentiary Representative Viktor Cherkesov himself (2nd place). The leader, as always, is Vladimir Yakovlev.
OLGA DRAMARETSKAYA

Newspaper "Kommersant St. Petersburg" No. 230 dated December 18, 2001, p. 4

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