Promotion of political leaders in social networks: experience of the 2011-2012 election campaigns

The article covers the social media promotion strategies of political leaders during 2011 Parliamentary Elections in Russia and 2012 Presidential Elections in Russia. Author researches technological, infrastructure, domestic and international contexts of mentioned campaigns. The scientific novelty of the research should be referred to as the lack of the articles covering this field alongside with holistic approach to studied processes. Leveraging comparative and classification methods, the author demonstrates two key versions of political promotion strategies: positive and negative strategies (focus on promotion of the candidate vs focus on the criticism of the opponents); centralized and decentralized strategies (focus on less number of channels and resources vs focus on high number of channels and resources).The novelty of the study lies in the identification of two opposing strategies for promoting political leaders in social networks in 2011-2012, inherent in United Russia and the parliamentary opposition, as well as a comprehensive description of the technological and infrastructural context of the penetration of Internet resources in the Russian Federation at the stage under consideration. The article uses general scientific (analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, classification) and specialized social and humanitarian research methods - comparative-historical, historical-systemic, content analysis, etcThe novelty of the study lies in the identification of two opposing strategies for promoting political leaders in social networks in 2011-2012, inherent in United Russia and the parliamentary opposition, as well as a comprehensive description of the technological and infrastructural context of the penetration of Internet resources in the Russian Federation at the stage under consideration.

political leaders, elections in Russia, State duma in Russia, President of Russia, Presidential Elections in Russia, Parliamentary Elections in Russia, internet, social networks, election campaign, political PR