Political Culture in the Age of Digitalization: New Research Tools

The article highlights how digitalization has affected political culture and how to explore it. It is proved that the classical methods of analysis, which were revolutionary and effective for political science of the 20th century, lose their explanatory capabilities due to the huge amounts of information, the speed of its dissemination and the change of channels and ways of communication, the transition of subjects to cyberspace. The possibilities of new methods of big data analysis are substantiated, social networks and digital texts, which provide unique opportunities for studying political processes in real time and on a wide sample. Such methods as Big Data analysis, social network analysis, automated content analysis and ethnography of digital communities are proposed for use. The advantages (speed and scale, accuracy and detail, automation, new data sources, visualizability, multidisciplinarity) and disadvantages (ethical issues, lack of open data, limited access to data, imperfection of language models and automatic analysis tools for the Ukrainian language) of methods for studying political culture at the present stage are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the problems caused by digitalization, which should be taken into account when interpreting research results: the problem of representativeness of data, access to data on private platforms, restrictions on private companies, data filtering, algorithmic influences, shadow data and non-representativeness due to bias, which will manifest themselves, in particular, in the use of the Western canon of perception and analysis of political culture and ignoring the approaches of the East, not taking into account their penetration into the spheres the life of Europe and the West. The significant potential and functionality of the analyzed methods for improving the study of political culture are proved and the prospects for future scientific research in this aspect are formulated.