What happened to liberal dreamers? Transformation of ideological discourse of field challengers as they become incumbents: cases of discursive drift in Russia (1991-2022)
Despite early expectations, the window of opportunity for Russia to make the transition to liberal democratic system shut down soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The paradoxical political behaviour that is singled out in the current research is the transformation undergone by public actors who identified themselves as liberals in the early 1990s and secured positions of power by using liberal discourse. In Vladimir Putin’s post-2000 Russia many of them would become salient anti-liberal advocates and legislators. By studying their “discursive drift”, central object of the research, the author of this project aims to understand whether liberal backsliding was caused by adaptation of actors to their new positions of power or indeed by structures inherent to neoliberal ideology.
Conceptually, the project relies on the theory of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam) completed with the elements of other theories concerning fields and actors (Bourdieu and Waquant; DiMaggio and Powell), as well as concepts related to discourse (Alexander; Fairclough) and social power (Mann). Combining the three conceptual resources, the author claims, could contribute to theoretical understanding of transformation of field challengers as they acquire social power and become field incumbents.
A series of three case studies traces the genesis and development of political, academic and public economy fields in Russia in 1991-2022, actors of which were the main early distributors of neoliberal discourse. Control cases are taken from Hungary and Turkey to test the discovered relations between the variables. Methodologically, the project looks to trace processes through a combination of archival work, critical discourse analysis, and analysis of qualitative interviews.
