Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Government – Citizen Interaction Online. Examining the Social Media Pages of the Russian Regional Authorities

P. 107–119.

Kabanov Y., Anna Kuzmenko

The current stage of e-participation development in Russia is associated with unification across the country as well as the institutionalization of social media (SM) as a channel of government-citizen communication. As a result, subnational governments are actively launching and utilizing their official SM pages. This pilot study attempts to explore some emerging patterns of their use by public authorities and citizens. The overview of 79 regions is complemented by a deep analysis of five cases. Overall, one may notice substantial variation in how actively these SM pages are used across the country, which may reflect the differences in regional e-governance performance as well as human capital development. In terms of content, the communication is mostly centered on non-politicized issues related to socioeconomic policies and public administration. This trend can be attributed to most of the regions, though some peculiar topics can be revealed in separate cases. While the focus of SM pages is on informing citizens, the latter seem to use these pages to communicate their problems to the public authorities, thus contributing to the institutionalization of SM as an e-participation mechanism. At the same time, the level of engagement remains low and does not show a certain positive or negative trend so far, despite the recent federal initiatives.

Keywords: e-Participation, Social Media in Russia

In book

16th International Conference, SCSM 2024, Held as Part of the 26th HCI International Conference, HCII 2024, Washington, DC, USA, June 29–July 4, 2024, Proceedings, Part III. volume 14705. Social Computing and Social Media

Cham: Springer, 2024.