Does government hear citizenry? The quality of deliberative practice between authorities and citizens on social media in Russia

Since the late 2000s, political science has been trying to figure out how governments use social media in their interaction with citizens and public policing. As for Russia, the process of active involvement of authorities in communication with citizens on social media and formation of new channels of e-participation has begun in 2020. In this regard, there is a need to assess the contribution of social networks to evolution of the communication system between the Russian government and society. The current paper aims at investigating the quality of deliberative practice between Russian authorities and citizens on social media in order to understand whether and how the results of social media dialogue between government and citizenry can be used and implemented in the process of public policymaking. For our study, we employ a medium-size case of an environment-related issue discussed on VK.com, comprising 1,286 comments of both citizens and governmental representatives. To assess the deliberative quality of discussion, we use two approaches: Discourse Quality Index (2003) and analytical approach developed by Misnikov (2011-2012). As a result, a selected online discussion can be described as 1) highly interactive, with dominance of hyperactive users; 2) unfocused, predominantly conducted on other issues; 3) weekly justified; 4) moderately civil, with little rates of incivility, but more towards citizens rather than towards government; 5) poorly constructive, with predominance of alternative proposals coming more from citizens than authorities; 6) more inclined towards agreement than otherwise, with slight tendency to cooperation between citizens and authorities.