DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2020.1.31884

Abstract: The article discusses how the factions in Moscow Zemstvo and Perm Zemstvo assemblies were formed in the first three years of their activity since zemstvos were founded in the second half of the 19th century. These zemstovs have been chosen in order to compare the political structure of the local government both in the capital and in provinces as well as to evaluate the factor of proximity to the imperial institutions and political processes. Both zemstvos directed the life of their economically developed guberniyas, were “active” and their experience was transferred across Russia due to its fruitful results. Social networks inform about glasnye (deputies) who led discussions as well as the decision making process and zemstvos work. As a result, one can find universal and specific features of deputies’ political fragmentation. The research methodology is the network approach and the social network analysis which provided for simulating interaction structures, identifying deputy groups and analyzing them. The authors have studied all journals of Moscow and Perm Zemstvos regular and emergency meetings held during the first three-year period of their activity and have singled out specific discussions. To study personal links they have collected auxiliary data sets providing information about deputies’ personal participation as well as the issues discussed. The study is the first to group glasnye, analyze their cliques and compare peculiar features of zemstvo meetings understudy. In general, the social network analysis supports the idea that personal activity at zemstvo meetings was more effective than the group one at the initial stage. This is supported by the voting results analysis as well. The formation of factions was also greatly hindered by social and political views of zemstvo members.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2018.4.28053

Abstract: The article studies personal alphabetic indexes to transcripts of State Duma meetings in the early 20th century. Alphabetic transcripts indexes are important as they structurally demonstrate activity of each Duma member thus allowing one to qualitatively and quantitatively estimate deputies’ work. The article traces changing approaches to publish information about personal characteristics and parliamentarians’ activity and studies the source structure and content dynamics. The research methodology is based on the analysis of historical XML markup texts. To solve the research problems the author has developed a scheme of XML markup of indexes texts. Their structure included tags to describe the main source parameters such as source metadata, deputies’ personal characteristics and activities during sessions of the first through the fourth convocations of the Russian parliament. Tag analysis provided for estimating the degree of precision deputies’ activity was described as well as changing structure of data presentation and find permanent information about deputies and variable data in different session indexes. The results of this study allow one to estimate the information potential of the source in its dynamics, make up for incompleteness of data with information from transcripts and analyze the nesting of tags to classify deputies according to activity characteristics.