Political management: routinization of meanings and structural updates

Abstract

The combination of the state's deliberate attempts to regulate and construct social relations with the accompanying and often alternative forms of social actors' activity raises questions about the effectiveness of the methods used by the authorities to achieve their goals and meet the interests of society. At the same time, the desire of many governments to solve this dilemma through the use of mandatory regulation is reflected in the emphasis on the projective (as opposed to the public) nature of public management, which devalues the role of open communication between the government and the population and rigidly links political management to directive models of public regulation (and in some cases, to the use of force). At the same time, such approaches revive technocratic ideas that strip political management of its social, axiological, and attributive meanings. By contradicting the network and informal practices of political governance (which create real boundaries between the state and society), these ideas obscure the fundamental parameters of political management that emerge in the latent sphere of politics and subsequently determine the implementation of key government policies (such as public budgeting, infrastructure projects, etc.). At the same time, there are currently no systematic attempts in the scientific literature (with the possible exception of the theory of support coalitions (Р. Sabatier)) to describe the structural characteristics of political management that emerge in the internal communications of the ruling class beyond the institutional design. In this context, the research objective is to use a neo-institutional methodology and theoretical constructs from behavioral, communicative, network, and game approaches to characterize the initial forms of political governance that emerge in competitive communications between individual and micro-group elite actors that are closed to the public. In this context, based on the identification of typical behavioral patterns and practices of elite actors in the latent sphere, the article proposes a model of “confidential political management” that contains analytical methods of congruent representation, that expand the structural foundations of political management and contribute to a more holistic interpretation of this concept.