Representations of Trust to Public Service in Russian Newspapers during Election Time: Corpus-based Content Analysis in Public Administration Sociology

Abstract

This article presents a study of the trust as social and public administration categories from the sociological and corpus-based perspective. To study the trust as the social category was elected a newspaper corpus (corpus of contemporary media). The corpus includes the texts of the seven media: printed Newspapers ("Novosty", "Sovetsky sport", "Trud", "Komsomolskaya Pravda"), and electronic agencies (RIA Novosti, RBC, "New region") in approximately equal volume. The study has revealed that the category ‘trust’ in the Russian newspapers is used in the context of political institutions. The political context means that the text describes the relationship of the actors of public administration, who, in Russia, often are the staff of public service. We believe that this fact highlights the loyalty of people to the authorities. It is indirectly confirmed by the data of positive mentions of trust in the context of ‘respect’ and ‘authority’. In 2011, State Duma elections took place, with the number of mention of trust in political institutional context decreasing more than twice. Thus, in the pre-election period, the significance of the problem of recognition and respect for the subjects of political institutions in the media decreases, but increases the importance of social harmony.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s1p436