Civil Online Examination of the Work of Regional Management Systems in the Context of Socio-Cultural Modernization Processes in the Region

Abstract

The study is part of a hybrid methodology that combines field and remote methods for collecting primary sociological data. The goal of the study is to verify and show the capabilities of expert online survey in studying the issues of reforming the power and management hierarchy in conjunction with the data from official sources, representative field survey, content analysis of the regional media and online studying of network communities in regions with different levels of socio-cultural modernization, which are used as a whole in the study under a Russian Science Foundation grant. The paper presents summarized results of the initial stage (in four out of twelve regions of the Russian Federation) of this study aimed to obtain representative data on the work of government and management authorities in the context of socio-cultural modernization in individual regions, to identify relations that affect the functionality of regional administration systems, which determine the nature and level of their development, and the ability of regional power and management vertical to effectively solve socio-economic problems. The authors pay attention to the question of methodological verification of expert opinions in the framework of comparing the data of socio-economic and socio-political ratings; the question is raised concerning the necessity of development and introduction of technology of communicative feedback between government and management authorities and the public. The main source of empirical data used in the article is the expert online survey conducted with the participation of the authors in 2015, one more source is the data on socio-economic and socio-political ratings of development of Russian regions in this period. The work, as part of a general research under the RSF grant, taking into account the published preliminary data, continued in the remaining eight regions in 2016–2017. The generalized scientific results are planned to be presented at the final international conference in October 2017

Keywords

• regional government systems
• socio-cultural modernization in regions expert online survey