Abstract
Judging political processes across the symbolic spectrum is controversial. The criteria for the effectiveness of this political direction can be revealed by examining the identity politics as a political course, with the respective stated objectives and achievable results. Approaches to assessing the effectiveness in political practice can be divided broadly into two types: internal (those assessing the qualities of the political elite itself) and external (those assessing the social effect). When studying identity politics, Russian authors employ both approaches, which at the empirical level incorporate expert interviews, the “case-study” method, population surveys, and the analysis of political discourse. Within Russian regional identity politics research, an instrumental approach is still a major trend, and therefore the assessment of the regional authorities’ efforts toward shaping a territorial brand is crucial in analyzing identity politics as a whole. In this article, we examine some successful cases where territorial branding was integrated into the overall picture of regional identity politics. By analyzing the author’s techniques on measuring the effectiveness of symbolic politics, we were able to form a number of focuses for the research of this political course.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The research was conducted at St. Petersburg State University with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation under research project N 23-28-00933 "Identity politics in Russian agglomerations in the context of international experience".References
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