Старцев Я. Ю. Неофеодализм или неопатримониализм? Количественный анализ политологической концептуализации «нового Cредневековья» [Электронный ресурс] // Vox medii aevi. 2019. Vol. 2(5). С. 127–149. URL: https://voxmediiaevi.com/2019-2-startsev
DOI: 10.24411/2587-6619-2019-00017
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Yaroslav Startsev
Candidate of Sciences (Political Studies), Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Neo-feodalism or Neopatrimonialism? Quantitative Analysis of the “New Middle Ages” Conceptualizations in Political Science
The article bears on statistical analysis of medievalist lexis in Russian political science research. The main research goal is to evaluate how far Russian political scientists are concerned by the larger trend of describing contemporary Russian society and politics in terms of neo-medieval ones, with conceptual analogies between present and medieval political and social institutions. Such a goal supposes, first, an evaluation of frequency distribution of the medievalist terms in political research by year, and, second, an analysis of these terms in order to figure out the level of categorization and conceptualization in their use. The research is based on a representative corpus of Russian articles and dissertations in political science from 1991 to 2018 (about 25,000 texts and more than 100 millions words), methods are based on the contextual frequency distribution analysis.
The main hypothesis presumes a parallel existence of two different ways to describe the modern Russian society when using archaizing analogies: a medievalist approach based on direct conceptual parallels between contemporary institutions and medieval ones, and a neopatrimonialist approach based on the neopatrimonialism conceptual framework.
As a result we can conclude that medievalist lexis is used occasionally in variable and often unique contexts, without evident and regular semantic dependencies between context words. The use of medievalist terms is declining, and they are more and more often marked off with quotation marks that accentuate their rather metaphorical than categorical character. By contrast, neopatrimonialistic lexis frequency is going up from year to year, especially at the mid-2000s. Neopatrimonialistic terms have close and regular contextual relations with similar categories as “regime”, “autocracy”, or “transformation”. So, we can postulate a substitution of the medievalistic lexis and of the medievalistic approach by neopatrimonialistic ones, within the same trend of archaizing descriptions of the modern Russian society, being confirmed by the data from Russian National Corpus.
Key words: frequency analysis; medievalism; neo-feodalism; neopatrimonialism; political discourse.