Media discourse on receiving funds for financing of the elections’2019 in Ukraine

Abstract

One of the most important indicators of democracy is electoral transparency, which is characterised by the legitimacy of campaign financing. Since Ukraine declares its desire to join the European Union, it should demonstrate the compliance with the values common to the EU, one of which is democracy. In 2019, Ukraine held «double» elections, around which, traditionally, a multi-vector discourse unfolded in the media space. One of the areas covered was the financing of election campaigns. The author applied one of the basic sociological methods of document analysis – content analysis of the discourse devoted to financing the 2019 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns in Ukraine. The results of empirical study demonstrated that funding for these two campaigns was reported differently. Thus, in the coverage of the presidential campaign considerable attention was paid to the coverage of its various aspects. Moreover, the attention was paid to the type of voter bribery, known as direct. The parliamentary media campaign received less attention than the presidential campaign. The most frequent attention was paid to indirect voter bribery. The tone of the discourse was quite difficult to capture, however, if we evaluate the correlation between the negative and positive contexts of describing the financing of election campaigns, then, of course, the negative ones were much more prevalent.