Use of political technologies during election campaigns in Ukraine

Abstract

The article emphasizes that during the conduct of elections, political technologies occupy a central place, in the form of their component part – electoral technologies. They differ from all others in their focus on including socio-psychological mechanisms that regulate the behavior of voters. In a narrower sense, electoral technology can be called a certain method of fighting for the electorate. The authors analyzed a significant number of political technologies and found that the most commonly used are technologies for creating a political image; political PR; electoral technologies; political marketing; branding; technologies for regulating political conflicts; lobbying technologies, etc. Various approaches to determining the typology of electoral technologies are considered, in particular those based on the principles of legislation and ethical norms (“white” technologies that do not contradict the current electoral legislation; “gray” technologies that come into conflict with the norms of public morality and the accepted method of conducting an election campaign, but do not provide for direct violation of the law; “black” technologies that violate the current legislation) and the division of electoral technologies according to certain criteria is proposed. It is concluded that the application of such criteria as the scale, nature of motivation, scope of implementation, territorial feature, method, intensity and strength of influence on the electorate, options for their application make it possible to study the essence of electoral technologies more deeply and take a fresh look at the issues of their classification.