The article presents an overview of the subject field of legislative research in political science. The author conceptualizes the concepts of “legislative” and “lawmaking”, describes the main historical milestones in the development of the mentioned research area, and he also talks about the most popular topics now. The author writes about the scientific approaches and methods of studying legislative bodies and other political actors. The author's typology is built on the difference between the external and internal environment of the parliamentary activity as a subject of research. In the first case, researchers analyze the legislative work of the president, government, courts, non-majoritarian bodies, and public groups that use parliament as a field for interaction during decision-making. In the second, scholars study the legislative institutions within parliament, the processes within them and the technologies they employ. The author also notes the topics of the structural diversity of parliament, decisionmaking procedures, and networking of political actors. He describes promising directions of research on discourse and argumentation practices, including the use of neural networks. 

This review highlights various aspects of the relationship between elected legislatures (that in the broad sense could be called the majoritarian institutions) and the non-majoritarian institutions (such as executive agencies, central banks, etc.). The topics covered include efficient delegation of authority from principal to agent, the correlates of such efficient delegation, as well as the tools that legislatures might use to maximize the utility they derive from such delegation. Based on the state-of-the-art literature on the topic of delegation from majoritarian to non-majoritarian institutions, we show that the main instruments of delegation include selection of an agent by the principal; the formal regulation of the agent’s activities by the principal; as well as using informal restrictions and threats to influence the agent’s activities. At the same time, the non-majoritarian institutions’ activities and strategies to expand their competences and increase their actual discretion remain poorly studied. An additional promising area of research is the non-majoritarian institutions’ positioning and strategizing under circumstances where the existent formal institutional structure cannot serve as a sufficient guarantee of their autonomy and independence. Placed in such dire conditions, they can be assumed to try and defend themselves against attacks by the legislatures and elected politicians, or at least to adapt their activities accordingly in anticipation of a possibility of such hostile behaviour. 

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. 

The article examines the appeal to the Soviet past in the rhetoric of two Russian parliamentary political parties: «Just Russia» and LDPR. The authors analyze the narratives used in the discourse of these parties, the goals of appealing to the Soviet heritage and the influence of the characteristics of the parties on their rhetoric.
The research was conducted on the basis of the texts published on the official websites of the parties. The authors highlight the main speakers of the party addressing to the image of the Soviet past, the volume of references to the Soviet past in the texts, the reasons of mentioning the Soviet past, events and persons to whom the authors refer, the characteristics of the assessment of the past, the use of the image of the past as a tool of identification and self-identification.
The study revealed the stylistic and thematic heterogeneity and inconsistency of discourses about the Soviet in the rhetoric of «Just Russia» and LDPR. The LDPR rhetoric is mainly dominated by the negative representation of the Soviet system. The positive references prevail in the texts of representatives of «Just Russia». A positive image of the Soviet appears in the narratives of the LDPR in the context of the Great Patriotic War and Victory. In addition, there is another frequently mentioned topic in the textes of «Just Russia» – the social achievements of the Soviet Union. The parties use the discourse of the Soviet past to present their program provisions. They also utilize it as an instrument of party self-identification and a means of distancing themselves from their main political opponent – the Communist Party, and in the case of «Just Russia» from the «party of power», liberal political actors and non-sistemic opposition. 

The article contributes to the literature about the key actors of the Russian politics of memory, as public activity focused at promotion of specific interpretations of collective past. It takes the transformations of the federal law «On the days of military glory and commemorative dates of Russia» as a case for analysis of the role of the deputies of State Duma in constructing the infrastructure for commemorations of collective past. The case of this law was selected not only because of its role in establishing the official commemorative calendar, but also because the multiple amendments to this law provide a rich material for revealing the struggle of the Russian parliamentary parties for interpretation of the collective past in changing political context. The analysis was based on multiple versions of the law available in «Garant» database, information about the bills about amendments and transcripts of Duma’s proceedings available at its official website. The article follows the transformations of the law from 1995 till 2022. It characterizes mnemonic agendas of the parliamentary parties that are concerned with commemoration of specific types of historical events, and describes deputies as specific mnemonic actors, who have to take into account imperatives of electoral struggle and party ideologies. 

The article analyzes a new phenomenon in the legislation and political practice of the Great Britain and Canada – the establishment of a fixed date for the elections of legislatures. In 2011, the UK passed the Fixed Term Parliaments Act (repealed in 2022), which the first time legislated a fixed date for elections to the House of Commons. Before and after the repeal of this Act, elections by law must be held at least once every five years, but the Prime Minister could and can advise the monarch to use the royal prerogative of early dissolution of parliament. The author examines the political conditions for the adoption and repeal of this Act, the arguments of its supporters and opponents, ways of «bypassing» the Act. The author concludes that the introduction of a fixed term for the House of Commons had practically no effect on the prime minister's freedom of action to call early elections. Historically, the dates for elections to the Canadian Parliament and the provincial legislatures of Canada were not fixed and were determined by the prime minister and provincial premiers at their discretion, which was criticized because it gave significant advantages to the government and the ruling party. In 2001, British Columbia was the first to pass legislation to fix the date of provincial elections. Several other provinces followed suit. In 2007, a fixed date was set at the federal level. The article raises the question of whether the Canadian parliament has become a congress due to this innovation. Answering it in the negative, the author analyzes the provisions of laws and court decisions, as well as the practice of the institution of fixing the date of elections. The article draws a general conclusion that despite new trends in the development of the institution of parliamentary dissolution, the parliamentary system in the UK and Canada remains flexible: it gives the Prime Minister a choice of alternatives to conduct in the event of political disagreements. The author emphasizes that despite the innovations, parliamentarism in the UK and Canada retains its essential properties. 

The article is dedicated to the study of the legislative process and the analysis of procedures for making administrative decisions in modern Russia in the emergency situations of 2020–2022. Theoretical and methodological approaches to the extraordinary and the regular in law-making process and in administrative practices are studied. The concept of social order as a regular phenomenon, as well as the phenomenon of the extraordinary in political philosophy are considered. The features of legislative regulation in a situation where emergency conditions become a source and reason for change are analyzed; the development of measures from an exclusive to permanent one is traced. Based on a study of the behavior of the governmental bodies of the Russian Federation in conditions of emergency, conclusions are drawn about changes in the model of public administration in the context of global and internal instability: with the acceleration and intensification of the process of considering bills, the actors involved in lawmaking tend to adopt norms that, purposing to ensure the safety of citizens and protect their interests, limit their rights and concentrate power in the hands of government departments.

This paper is devoted to the consideration of applying legislative technologies by political actors in the legislative process. The key features of such technologies are their replicability, strict procedure framework and the legislative process as the field of their application.

The paper examines how political actors used specific techniques, depending on their purposes, such as speeding up, slowing down or block the adoption of a particular political decision. It was also noted that the key actors of the legislative process are the president, the government and parlamentaries.

It was found that the procedures of the legislative process are an important part of legislative technologies. A political actor can manipulate them and exert to the result of legislative process and the specific characteristic of the decisions taken.

At the same time, the political entity of the legal framework legislative process begins to work, provided that the political actor has the will.

Public contestation is a form of individual or collective political activity aimed at criticizing, refuting or opposing a project or goal being implemented, through introducing additions or alternative projects. The variety of public discussions, practices of public contestation can be divided into five platforms (spheres): discursive, protest, electoral, party-parliamentary and expert. The contestation on the party-parliamentary platform has the greatest impact on the final version of the political project. The object of the study is the public contesting by the opposition parties in the regional parliaments of the Central Black Earth Region.
The empirical base of the research includes public statements (discourse) and political actions of the deputies of regional parliaments, members of the parliamentary groups of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, LDPR, «Fair Russia», which are usually viewed as opposition system parties. Only these three parties enjoy federal parliamentary status and have recognizable national leaders. In this study, we have examined the websites of the regional branches of these parties and messages containing elements of protest and contestation.
During the period under review, the parliamentary opposition parties in the regional parliaments of the Central Black Earth Region have neither institutional capacity, nor sufficient electoral potential to participate fully in the negotiations on draft laws at the regional level. For this reason, the main form of public contestation has become the organization of public protest actions in order to demonstrate the principled position and the seriousness of their struggle to the voters of the party. 

Modern regional political systems are facing increasing public demand for expanding channels of political representation and opportunities for real participation in shaping the political agenda. Various public stakeholders in the regions are interested in creating necessary conditions for implementation of civic engagement and collective initiatives in legislative process.
In this paper, an attempt is made to reveal the possibilities, limitations of the formation and use of the institute of collective public leadership to solve the problems of the regional legislative process in example of two regions of the Central Chernozem region – Voronezh and Tambov regions.
This article presents the results of an expert survey of a group of current deputies of regional assemblies and focus groups of representatives of opposition political parties and the expert community of Voronezh and Tambov regions. The study participants described their attitude to the phenomenon of collective leadership, competencies and qualities of a public leader. They told about their experience of participating in the process of discussion and political decision-making at the regional level. The informants pointed out the difficulties of holding public hearings, public examinations of draft laws and revealed some mechanisms for involving the population in these procedures.
The article analyzes the problem of implementing initiative budgeting in legislative process, including practice of interaction of deputies with initiative groups, specifics of the work of expert councils, public institutions and discussion platforms. It is concluded that it is necessary to develop formats of direct communication channels (not imitative and not nominal) between legislative authorities and society in order to receive operational “feedback” and realize the potential of collective public leadership in the regions. 

In 2023, it will be 20 years since the law, which became the legal basis for the reform of local self-government, was introduced and adopted. In 2021, as a part of the implementation process of the constitutional reform of 2020, a draft bill «On the general principles of organizing local self-government in a unified system of public authority» was introduced and adopted in the first reading, which should replace the law of 2003. The prospect of terminating the 2003 law makes it possible to analyze the history of all its changes (implemented and rejected) in terms of the behavior of legislators.
The article is based on database of 452 draft bills, which is built on the information (texts of bills, explanatory notes, reviews of authorities, tables of amendments, records of plenary meetings, voting results) from the legislative activity support system of the SAS «Lawmaking». In the article following aspects of lawmaking in the sphere of local self-government are analyzed: 1) the activity and effectiveness of the initiators of bills (regional legislators, deputies, the Government of the Russian Federation, the President of the Russian Federation, senators and the Federation Council); 2) the role of parliamentary (factions, committees) and extra-parliamentary institutions and substitutes (the Council of Legislators, the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, the Council for the Development of Local Self-Government under the President of the Russian Federation, public organizations) at different stages of lawmaking, including «zero readings»; 3) relations between parliamentary factions in the context of municipal reform (inter-fractional initiatives, opposition initiatives blocked by the majority, types of voting on adopted laws); 4) legislative mechanisms/practices in 4–7 convocations of the State Duma compared.
The article proposes a typology of the behavior of parliamentary fractions in the course of voting on bills. 

The research is devoted to cosponsorship networks in the State Duma of VI–VII convocations. The interrelation between the structural characteristics of legislative activity in the State Duma and the indifferent characteristics of deputies when preparing bills are the subject of this article. In particular, the authors raise the question of what factors contribute to co-authorship link formation among deputies. The theoretical part of the paper briefly discusses the main conceptual approaches to the explanation of legislative activity in the Legislatures, the experience of the modern legislative studies of Russian parliamentarianism, as well as the features of the network approach in the newest studies of the Legislatures. Then theoretical hypotheses about the possible determinants of co-authorship relations between deputies are substantiated. The study relies on the original array of data on the open biographical characteristics of the deputies of the State Duma VI-VII, and also incorporates information on the bills from the GAS «Elections» database. The authors used descriptive and inferential network analysis methods to prove various hypotheses on the cosponsorship ties formation. In the networks of cosponsorship of bills, communities were identified based on the maximization of the modularity measure. Inferential regression analysis models were then constructed using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) and Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM). The results suggest that the most significant structural determinant of joint lawmaking is joint membership of parliamentary caucuses. Similar biographical characteristics and joint membership in committees are also positively related to lawmaking interaction among MPs. At the same time, the endogenous structure of the network of joint lawmaking has little impact on the co-authorship ties between MPs. 

The article is devoted to revealing features of the Russian State Duma’s functioning from the perspective of deputies’ behavior strategies. It explores Open Data sources to study the results of individual votes for each of the issues being discussed in the State Duma between 2018 and 2022.

The realization of an ‘Open Data’ initiative is a part of a state information policy allowing researchers to analyze the functioning of a state apparatus substantially. Its implementation in Russia took place in 2014–2016, while afterward attention to the topic of information transparency decreased and access to the number of already published datasets was limited.

Nevertheless, despite overall paradigm shifts, the transfer toward transparent data partly continues. Open Data of the State Duma allows us to analyze how the lower chamber of a parliament works, how each deputy votes, and what factors (for instance, the COVID pandemic, the Special Military Operation, and external sanctions) affect the decision-making process.

The main goal of the research is to explain why parliamentarians intentionally avoid voting while being at the same time present on a plenary session. According to an initial hypothesis, deputies as rational actors apply it as an individual strategy – abstention presents a ‘grey zone' in which they can avoid external accusations of disloyalty or violation of party rules. This assumption is supported by the results of voting themselves alongside observations regarding indirect aspects of the State Duma’s functioning.

The second significant goal of this study is to demonstrate Open State Data as a resource that can be successfully studied by researchers and to reveal the potential of the State Duma Open Data particularly that can be used in future research in a respective field.

Particular cases of disputes between actors on political issues can be traced to the differences in the ideologies they follow. In this regard, analyzing political discourse, it would be useful to attribute individual positions expressed by actors to their ideologies. However, in practice this proves to be difficult due to the shortcomings of the classifications of political ideologies used in modern science. These classifica- tions have developed historically, and therefore their applicability is limited to those historical periods and geographical boundaries for which they are relevant. Although the approaches to ideology existing in modern political science (e.g. the approach of M. Frieden), give useful results, they do not properly answer the question of what explains the difference between the ideologies of various groups with claims to power. By answering this question, we get a criterion for a scientific typology of political ideologies. As such a criterion, this article proposes the difference in values that various groups use to justify their claims to power. Values serve as the basis for the construction of political ideologies, and the difference in values of various groups determines the difference in their ideologies. In the article, the qualitative theory of values developed by anthropologists (L. Dumont, J. Robbins) is used. For every private ideology, it is proposed to determine the core value upon which it is constructed. Ideologies that share the same core value are proposed to be grouped into types. The article identifies five possible core political values (kinship, knowledge, power, property, labor) and five corresponding types of ideologies.