A Critical Analysis of Russian Political Party?s Websites According to Navigation, Structure and Content

Abstract

During the development of information technologies era political discourse passes actively into the Internet space. Politicians, parties and the organizations use web resources more often to represent their position on the most significant social and political issues. At the same time this trend becomes typical for countries with highly developed democracy, as well as for nations, gravitating to authoritarian management methods. In the latter countries the Internet serves almost the only means of expressing opposition views to the current government. In this regard, the role of political web resources seems quite significant to promote the ideas of freedom of speech and pluralism. There are rather large number of political parties functioning in Russia, which have not received their representation in the State Duma of the Russian Federation due to failure to percent barrier during elections. However, they have a wide circle of supporters in the majority of regions in Russia and highlight their activities through their own means of mass communication, including the official sites. In this paper, we consider three such features ranking russianpolitical parties on the Internet-"Union of Right Forces","Right Cause","Patriots of Russia" in terms of navigation, structure and content of their official websites.