The article interprets linguistic and other turns as great, large, smaller and very tiny switches to the use of the possibilities of pragmatic, structuralist and interpretive research programs (Lakatos), as well as theories and concepts gravitating to them. It notes early precedents are discussed, including the political comparative studies of E. Freeman and the Chicago School of Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell. Then the paper considers the great «linguistic» turn of the middle of the last century, marked by the innovations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin. The next wave included the rise of the study of political discourses and concepts, the creation of typologies of speech acts and implicatures, the development of critical and structural functional linguistics and the emergence of social semiotics. Against this background, there is a degradation of the structuralist tradition through poststructuralism to current fashions of an art of pure play with arbitrary forms. The further advances embrace cognitive aspects of communication and interaction in politics, performatives, logonomic systems and rules, multimodal social semiosis, pragmatics and pragmasemantics. Finally, the article identifies effectiveness of innovations and discusses which of them have already been mastered, and which need further development.

The problem of discourse and legitimacy is covered in the article through the prism of the systemic or functional theory of political legitimacy, which became famous in European political science in the early 2000 s. The author examines the main provisions of this theory, originally developed by German political scientist Fritz Scharpf in connection with the study of politics and political legitimacy in the EU countries and at the pan-European level. Later, they were applied by a number of authors (the article focuses on the works of Marianne Knoer) in the process of studying the mechanism of legitimation of power in the so-called neo-autocratic regimes (regimes of the «new wave of authoritarianism» of the early 21st century). The introduction of the concepts of input-legitimacy and output-legitimacy, as well as the related concepts of «identitarian narratives», «regime efficiency» and «mission», allows for a better understanding of the mechanism of legitimacy functioning (consent of the governed with the authorities) in neo-autocracies. In the article, the author tries to apply this approach to the study of the Russian case, analyzing the legitimizing aspects of the discourse of Russian power in the context of the formation and evolution of the authoritarian political regime.

The thesis that the signified does not exist by itself, but is constructed in certain communities, which, in turn, assume a certain nature of sign production and circulation, was not immediately established in the research practice of the XX– XXI centuries. The article traces its formation and development from the studies of the Toronto School through various versions of the history of everyday life and the history of technology to mediology, actor-network theory and other modern strategies.

In parallel, the problematization of the position on the insignificance of the signified in semiotics and other strategies of text research (first of all, hermeneutics and poststructuralism) is shown. Turning to the origins of European culture (and, above all, to Plato's analysis of the name) allows us to sharpen the problem not so much of the signified as of the connection of names; the significance of not only «eidos» (the idea of a thing), but also «usia» (the way of organizing the world).

It shows the strategies and difficulties of implementing this project in modern approaches of taking into account the signified – first of all, the V. Patzel's projects of memocomplexes, U. Eco’s idea of the “code”, as well as B. Latour’s project of «secularization of the political», which showed that the signified «political» in the modern world actually involves five different reproduction networks and, accordingly, five different meanings and practices related to these meanings. It is discussed that each time the historically dimensional relationship of the production / circulation of signs, the language code and the community using signs requires conceptualization already in the dynamic model of sign production (which means simultaneous development of both the sign and the logic of constructing a meaningful world); possible common points and problems of constructing such a model are shown.

The article traces the formation of cognitive narratology, analyzes the possibilities and prospects of its use in the subject field of political science. It notes its relevance for the study of political phenomena and processes, as well as the importance of conceptualizing the concepts of «political perception» and «ideological representation» as cognitive phenomena. The cognitive-narratological concept of political perception is proposed, the essence of which is to consider perception as a type of knowledge about political phenomena and processes presented in mental models and embodied in speech forms. The possibilities of application in political studies of the concept of free indirect speech by M. Yan and cognitive interpretation of metaphors by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson are shown. It is concluded that political science is able not only to use the methodology of cognitive narratology in its research, but also to contribute to its pragmatic and constructivist development.

The publication of Austin's lectures was one of the critical events for both philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics of the second half of the twentieth century. After the systematization made by John Searle, the theory of speech acts and performatives has acquired a much more rigorous form in terms of its linguistic design, but by ignoring a number of extralinguistic factors determining communicative behavior. The author offers an alternative reading of Austin's work in order to highlight all those clarifications and reservations that have remained beyond the boundaries of Searle's interpretation. Such a reading of the lectures and the synopsis of these reservations make it possible to construct anotherversion, where the provisions considered, but not developed by Austin, might be its cornerstones. Instead of further purification, the theory may be saturated by consideration of phenomena that Austin treated as «non-pure», «non-direct» and «parasitic». The above-mentioned aspects have become particularly noticeable with regard to descriptions of political and social practices. The standard theory of performatives describes some specifically emphasized «emasculated» situations (e.g., speech etiquette or formulas of politeness, etc.), but it has proven ineffective beyond the descriptions of standardized situations (Searle). Another direction was the emphasis on aspects that could transform the theory of performatives into a theory of social action. (Derrida, Bourdieu, Butler). In the last decade, a range of conceptions considering the possibility of transcending from speech acts to actions and situations (Sbisà, Turner, May, Capone, Ilyin) have emerged. Considering these approaches, we also propose to supplement the theory of performatives with the notion of meaning and meaningful action. This allows for the convertibility of verbal and non-verbal mechanisms and the correlation of different modes of communication and social interaction.

The article explores various aspects of the study of factual disputes from the perspective of the pragmatic turn in political science. First, the article discusses pragmatics in general, starting from Peirce's semiotics and Austin's speech act theory and the theory of modalities, which laid the foundation for understanding how language is used to make truth claims and the various ways in which those claims can be challenged. Then the authors explore the concept of discourse as a social practice and its relation to the study of politics, drawing on the ideas of van Dijk and Wodak. We also discuss the role of power and ideology in shaping discourse, and the importance of analyzing multimodal social semiosis in understanding the constructing and contesting the factual disputes. The article also explores the logonomic systems and logonomic rules that underlie successful social semiosis, as well as the role of modal contexts and interworld relations in pragmasemantics. Finally, the authors discuss the importance of linguistic and social semiotic approaches to the study of disputes about facts in political science. By examining the linguistic and semiotic strategies used to construct and contest truth claims, we can gain a deeper understanding of the political forces involved in shaping public discourse and the ways in which language is used to shape public opinion.

Political power abstract concept using leads to paradoxicality and inconsistency in the theoretical constructions of political science. Without power, individuals cannot form a community necessary to achieve the good of each of them, but at the same time, any power is a restriction, suppression of subjectivity. Therefore, political power presupposes the formation of a certain semantic picture of the world, which explains and justifies the orders implemented by that power. Such a dominant semantic picture of the world provides the basis for the legitimacy of power, the consolidation of society, and common identity. It is multi-layered and fluid; and its formation involves not only the political class, but also the humanities, the education system, and personal experience. This process can be represented by the pragmasemantic approach as a cascade of interfaces (contexts) of meaning formation, each of which is operationalized as a value-regulatory system (VRS). From this point of view, the political power appears as the main VRS, which, in order to justify its influence on the ordering of others, claims to have the dominant semantic picture of world. However, society development needs the constructive variability of the reality comprehension and needs the power organization formats, capable of generating and maintaining such variability. Thus, political theory also needs a transition from operating with general abstractions to the constructive understanding of the procedural and operational nature of politics as applied to specific societies, taking into account their current problems and historical experience. Nowadays, this topic acquires a non-trivial significance, when the formats of the VRS in management, business, science, education, art, and personal life are radically changing.

The article analyzes the pragmasemantic aspects of creating a fake picture of history in the Russian-language Internet discourse by adherents of the Rodnoverie. The formation of an appropriate mythology is a way to overcome the identity crisis of the Rodnoverians and is also a part of the neo-pagan activity for the mass media promotion of this identity. The reasons for the attractiveness of the Internet commentary genre for manipulating public opinion are explained. The main techniques of information distortion are inversion, contrast, substitution, stigmatization, etc. The basic ways of establishing identity exploit «the self – the other» opposition. The effectiveness of manipulative influence of Rodnover propaganda with the help of fake pictures of history is explained by the expectations of a significant part of traditionalist- or nationalist-minded users of the Runet and their incompetence in history.

Absentee voting has originally been envisioned as a way to democratize electoral procedures, but its introduction in many countries challenges the legitimacy of elections, increasing risks of fraud, potentially changing the composition of the electorate, and putting voters in unequal circumstances. This article provides an overview and synthesis of responses to questions about how absentee voting (by mail and Internet) is transforming electoral processes in democratic regimes at both the micro and macro levels. In particular, the review focuses on the normative criticism of absentee voting, the theoretical and empirical responses to this criticism, and the positive and negative effects of its implementation, both large-scale and reflected in the electoral behavior of citizens who choose different ways of voting, as identified by researchers. The article also provides a semi-systematic overview of the results of the studies answering the questions about the influence of remote voting on the turnout and composition of the electorate. Albeit the issues addressed in the article are not typically examined from the angle proposed here and are not purely empirical, the review seeks to extract new knowledge from a synthesis and critique of relevant research. The article demonstrates the potential for pooling efforts in the study of absentee voting formats instead of focusing on specific modes as fundamentally different from one another. The review allows us to highlight promising directions for the study of both absentee voting and other alternative voting formats: the analysis of subnational variation of their effects, as well as longitudinal studies at the micro-level.

It is well known that Karl Marx distinguished his theory from both pure «science» and from the «utopianism» inherent in his predecessors. Paradoxically, these two elements constitute the thinking of Marx himself, being with each other in a complex interaction, the specifics of which this article is intended to reveal. To this end, the author distances himself from the classical political-philosophical debate about the relationship between Marx and the «utopian socialists» criticized by Marx. Instead, it is proposed to consider Marx's approach as a «research program» (Imre Lakatos), a «cognitive utopia» (Peter Lassman) and a «functional utopia» (Karl Mannheim). Basing on this analysis, features in the development of «Soviet» and «Western» Marxism are briefly traced. In conclusion, a further direction of Marx's analysis is proposed through the study of the third – theological – component of his thinking.

The study focuses on two types of political polarization (affective and ideological), which are supposed to influence the perception of political Internet trolling. The purpose of this study is to identify the role of affective and ideological polarization in perception of opposition and pro-government trolling. The author conducted a survey (N = 200) among users of Russian social network VK. During survey we showed our respondents vignettes with examples of troll-inflated conversations. These vignettes were composed based on indicators of trolling: provocation (aggression), mockery (sarcasm), spam, usage of templates and identification with trolls by other users. The dependent variable was the answer of the respondents, who decided in the course of the survey which example of discussion to classify as trolling. Respondents were also asked some questions to determine their political perceptions and level of perceived affective polarization. Two key independent variables were derived from their responses – distance between trolls’ and respondents’ political positions and the average level of perceived affective polarization. The author used probit-regression to measure the effect of these independent variables on respondents’ answers. As the result, we observe a statistically significant effect of ideological polarization on the perception of trolling. Hypothesis about the influence of affective polarization on the respondents’ answers was not confirmed.

The article offers an overview of biography of the prominent American political scientist Harold Gosnell (1896–1997) and analysis of his contribution to the development of political science. Gosnell was one of the most prominent representatives of the Chicago School of Political Studies during the 1920 s – 1940 s. Following the program of creating a «new science on politics» declared by the leader of the Chicago School, Charles Merriam, Gosnell had a great influence on the development of empirical research tools in political science. In particular, he used experimental methods for the first time in the history of political science. Among the scientific problems considered by Gosnell, it is necessary to mention the study of electoral behavior, the phenomenon of political machines, the participation of blacks in the political life of the United States. Gosnell's contribution to the methodology of political research was essential to the success of the behavioralist turn in political science.

Harold F. Gosnell (1896–1997), a well-known American political scientist and one of the leaders of the first generation of the Chicago school of political studies, in his article offers an overview of the use of quantitative methods in political research in the United States. Gosnell discusses the problem of identifying the unit of measure for political phenomena and processes, as well as the conceptual difficulties of deriving empirical patterns in political science. He shows that the movement of quantitative analysis is gaining momentum and expanding, and its potential is great. The scale of application of quantitative and statistical methods and the heuristic significance of the data obtained allow observers to speak about new horizons of political knowledge.

Dictionary of language of politics as an important document, fixing the dictionary meanings characteristic for a certain historical epoch, has a scientific and public importance. The purpose of the article is to determine the composition, systematization and brief characteristics of lexicographic products describing the language of politics. The research material is monolingual linguistic/complex paper dictionaries published in Russia since the end of the 20th century. Insufficient knowledge of the cognitive and research potential of dictionaries of the language of politics determines the relevance of the research. During the research we selected 54 dictionaries of the language of politics, which were divided into 18 types: author’s dictionaries, terminological dictionaries, dictionaries of neologisms, dictionaries of obsolete vocabulary, dictionaries of nicknames, linguistic and cultural dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations, thematic, ideographic, historical, associative dictionaries, dictionaries of professional vocabulary, dictionaries of metaphors, phraseological dictionaries, dictionaries of labels, dictionaries of slogans, dictionaries of abbreviations, slang dictionaries. The author's and terminological dictionaries, dictionaries of neologisms and obsolete vocabulary are the most quantitatively represented. In Russian political lexicography, we can witness the differentiation (by addressee, by unit of description, etc.) and specialization (narrowing of the boundaries of the subject of dictionary fixation) of dictionaries. New types of dictionaries that reflect the trends in the development of linguistics (cognitive research, anthropocentrism, functionalism, etc.) are emerging. Attention is also drawn to an increase in volume of dictionary entries and the use of visual illustrations in them, an encyclopedic interpretation of a word, an increase in a volume of extralinguistic data, there is a politically biased position in relation to the described vocabulary. Dictionaries of the language of politics can act as auxiliary material for conceptual, semantic, and cognitive studies of political communication.