The Four Russias: An Empirical Verification of the Expert Model of Segmentation of Political Audiences in the Context of the SMO
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2025.2.2775Keywords:
Special Military Operation (SMO), political audience segmentation, empirical verification of the model, segmentation models, ideological polarizationAbstract
The article is devoted to the development and testing of a model for segmenting a political audience in the context of the influence of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine (SVO) on Russian society. As a theoretical basis, the authors turn to segmentation concepts in the social sciences, consider the factors of social differentiation, and propose to apply the expert model of audience segmentation named «The Four Russias» by Evgenia Stulova and Evgeniy Minchenko. This model is based on such criteria as attitude towards SMO, migration behavior, emotional state, perceived values, and individual financial situation. The authors describe the methodology for operationalizing the criteria of the expert model and test them on the data of two waves of the all-Russian online survey held in 2023 and 2024 (N = 1.6 thousand respondents in each case), constructing soft and hard segmentation models.
Empirical fidings show four relatively stable segments, which are named «Departed Russia», «Metropolitan Russia», «Deep Russia», and «Warring Russia». The authors present detailed social portraits of these segments and demonstrate significant polarization across them by age, types of settlements, models of media consumption, values, and emotional assessment of the SVO. At that, cluster analysis of the perception of the SVO revealed the complexity and multifaceted attitude towards it, going beyond simple approval or disapproval. The authors emphasize the practical value of audience segmentation for developing effective political communication strategies in conditions of high polarization of opinions. The proposed approach allows accounting for the specifics of each selected group when interacting in the communicative space.
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