Cohort: POLS 39 

Topic of the thesis: Party Rhetorics and the Legitimation of Authoritarian Regime in the Russian Federation

Abstract: The study examines the rhetoric of political parties in Russia, focusing on the strategies and tactics used by United Russia and systemic opposition parties to legitimize power and maintain an authoritarian regime. The study aims to define whether State Duma parties use economic performance, stability, external threats, and nationalism sentiment in their rhetoric more frequently over time to consolidate power. To strengthen the findings derived from the analysis, the methods of legislative control over the leading party would be determined from the speeches to show the willingness of the opposition to block or support the decisions made by United Russia. There would be a specific focus on the growth of the nationalism sentiment in the systemic opposition speeches with the beginning of the Ukraine conflict and the Crimea annexation. It is believed that from that time United Russia has been using nationalism sentiment more to sustain the authoritarian regime during times of crisis and the need for legitimation. The text for the analysis is collected from official transcripts of State Duma speeches from 2003 to 2023. The research methodology involves the collection of keywords for selected topics using topic modeling and word embeddings and the calculation of similarity scores between the word vectors for the topic keywords and the word vectors for each word in the party speeches using the cosine similarity metric.

Research interests: Political theory, Party discourse, Legitimacy

Graduated from: BA Saint Petersburg State University, Russia/Bard College, NY, USA; MA National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

Degrees obtained: Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Master of Political Science

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