Institutional political science 2.0: theoretical and empirical dimensions

This article examines a project to update the theoretical and methodological arsenal of institutional political science, provisionally titled “Institutional Political Science 2.0” proposed by a group of Russian authors. It includes the development of concepts and typologies at the theoretical level and their subsequent substantiation and verification in a series of empirical studies of recent Russian politics. The article demonstrates that theoretical work with the concepts of “politics” and “the political” is conducted at the intersection of institutional political science and political philosophy, which facilitates a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of theoretical issues. The authors relate their developments to the contemporary neo-institutional approach, and in a broader political-philosophical sense to the “non-Machiavellian” tradition of political thought, which allows for the inclusion in the discussion of philosophical ideas from Antiquity, contemporary political philosophy, and contemporary political theories, in particular the theories of structuration, deliberation, neo-republicanism. The main results of the theoretical developments of the “Political Science 2.0” project are analyzed: the complex concept of “modern politics”, the associated political-institutional typology of “political space”, which distinguishes within it the “field of politics” and the “area of ascendency”, as well as the complex (“dual-core”) concept of ascendancy. The article concludes with a consideration of the application of the project’s theoretical tools to empirical research on Russian politics in the period 2018-2022, documenting the weakening of the potential of “modern politics” in Russian society and the expansion of the “area of ascendency” within it.