Ideological «harmony» in the State Duma: emergence, content, boundaries

In the 2000 s, a fairly stable party-political system was established in Russia, with the dominance of United Russia and the representation of three parties of the systemic opposition in the State Duma of the Russian Federation. The study is aimed to identify the space of ideological accord between all party factions of the State Duma in the parliamentary arena along three problematic ideological dimensions: the traditional «left-right», national-ethnic («Russian question») and global (the role of Russia in the world). Using the instruments of morphological analysis of ideologies and basing on the content analysis of the transcripts of the plenary sessions of the State Duma during the period 2003–2020 (1100 deputies, 154,4 thousand speeches and 26,558 million words), the key ideological concepts, which shape the space of accord, have been identified: «patriotism», «anti-Westernism» and «Russianness». Although each faction has its own configuration of these concepts that determines their centrality or complementarity, they are shared by all factions. Consequently, in their combination, it is these concepts that draw boundaries of the accord, whereas there is no agreement in the Duma out of these ideological concepts. The accord emerged in 2012–2013, even before the «Crimean consensus», which subsequently strengthened it. The key condition for the formation of the accord was the ideological dynamics of United Russia, which was clearly caused not by intra-Duma processes, but by the ideological evolution of the Kremlin. Starting from the 6 th convocation, that is, from 2012, the United Russia faction, firstly, has been ideologized (although it still remains more of an administrative faction in its rhetoric), and secondly, it has adopted ideological concepts already developed and verbalized by CPRF and LDPR. 

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