№ 5 - 2002
Goncharov D.V.
What There Lies behind the “Uncivicness”

The author’s thought is preoccupied by the issue of methods of studying the substantial diversity of Russian regions’ political culture, i.e. of studying its diversity inasmuch as the latter receives objectively discernible subjective expression which is exactly to be discerned, demonstrated and explained. The claimed purpose of the research is, in particular, to correctly pose the question of what patterns of uncivicness may be found in Russian subnational political culture, or, to be more concrete, what the Russian regional elites’ understanding of interaction between civil society and government at the local levels is like. The subjective structures of uncivicness, that are inherent in regional political culture, are investigated in the article through considering the orientations of elite groups. In order to reveal the diversity of social objects’ thinking, an original intensive research technique was employed — Q-methodology (one of the variants of content-analysis), which so far has been but seldom employed by Russian political scientists. The accomplished research is a case study: it is concentrated on studying the elite groups of one of the Russian regions, namely Orenburg oblast’.