Nedyak I.L. Power and Domination in the Collective Imaginary. Factors of the (De)Formation of the Political Sphere in Russia. Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2021, no. 3, pp. 30–45. DOI: 10.31857 ...

Abstract

Social relations of domination remove the original content of democratic institutions and practices. Steady development of social relations of domination is a vivid trend of recent decades. The goal of this article is to analyze the extent and nature of the domination social relations in contemporary Russia. The study uses the criteria of differentiation of political vs domination relations developed in modern conceptions of domination: generalization of rules, restructuration, arbitrary power, external control, management of a set of opportunities. The author uses data from the four waves of the all-Russian representative survey (2018, 2019, 2020,2021), conducted by the Department of Socio-Political Research of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to analyze and interpret it from the theoretical and methodological positions of the neoclassical republican conception of domination as arbitrary power. The article confirms and illustrates the essential differences in the collective imaginary, cognitive and motivational attitudes of citizens who rely and do not rely on their institutional protection from arbitrary power.