Institutional political science. Development of neo-institutionalism in contemporary Russia

The first part of the article presents achievements in the many years work of the Department of Comparative Political Studies of FCTAS RAS on the development of national institutional political science relating to the workout of the conceptual and categorical apparatus adequate to the Russian realities. The author outlines specially created ideal typical constructs “political field”, “field of domination”, “politics of modern type”, “political/emancipatory power”, “domination as a form of non-political power”. Their theoretical and methodological justification is given, their analytical potential for studying the unfinished institutionalization of the political order in Russia and identifying the resources of transformative politics is revealed.

In the second part of the article, the cross-cutting theme is the possibility of expanding the horizon for research on political-power relations through the optics of the concepts on domination, which is interpreted as a social pathology in modern democracies. It specifies the political-philosophical and theoretical foundations for the present-day scientific discourse and conceptions of domination, the criteria of conceptual differentiation between the two forms of power, the experience in the concepts operationalization. In the final empirical part of the study, based on the analysis of primary data from five waves of the all-Russian surveys, the analytical tool kit of dominance concepts is proved to be productive for studying the nature of Russia’s institutional environment. The article also proves a correlation between processes of proliferation of the domination social relations and deformation of political field, decrease of resources of society and potential of political innovations in Russia.

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