Erakondade kommunikatsioon venekeelse valijaskonnaga venekeelses meedias Riigikogu valimiste 2011 näitel

Abstract

Communication of Estonian political parties with the Russian-speaking electorate through the Russian-language media (example of Parliament elections 2011) The aim of this thesis is to analyze the communication of Estonian political parties with the Russianspeaking electorate before the 2011 Estonian parliament elections. The author aims to learn which topics politicians choose for pre-electional communication, how they approach the Russian-speaking auditorium in connection with these topics and how they debate with each other in the Russianlanguage media. Knowing the answer to these questions is important, because it gives the idea of how Russian-speaking minority is involved in the political life of Estonia. In the first part of this thesis author presents an overview of the position of the Russian-speaking minority in the Estonian society and gives a characterization of political communication in Estonian Russian-language and online media. The second chapter gives a basic information about Russian-language web-portals, which are analyzed in this research. It also gives an impression of the parties' previous relationship with the Russian-speaking community and brings those points of parties election programmes, which are related to this Russian-speaking part of electorate. This chapter ends with an overview of politician's performance in online-media before the elections 2007 and 2009. The empirical research carried out for the paper consists of two parts. First part uses qualitative analysis method and describes mainly the relationships between parties. Second part uses quantitative analysis method and shows parties approach to the topics, to the Russian community and to each other. The analysis in the result showed that two parties dominated during the pre-electional period, both as the opinion publishers and as the receivers of judgments from others. However, the parties' own initiative is also important. Topics connected to the Russian-speaking community were actively discussed during the preelection period, especially the Russian-language schools partial transition to Estonian-language teaching. The biggest discussion overall was about possible financing of one party from Russia. We can also see, that parties mainly try to be close to the Russian-speaking community, which is reflected both in spokespersons selection and topics discussions. However, the degree of closeness is different in case of different parties.