The Use of Mediation Techniques in Conflict Resolution during Electoral Campaigns

The article is devoted to the prospects of using mediation techniques in resolving electoral conflicts. Mediation, as a relatively new technology for Russian sociopolitical reality, appears to be one of the most promising techniques for resolving such conflicts, since it combines mobility, focus on a positive result, constructiveness and maximum flexibility, allows formulating and taking maximum account of current and rapidly changing interests of the parties in the political process. The article has a clearly expressed practical orientation. Its scientific novelty lies in the attempt to assess the prospects of using mediation techniques directly in the settlement of electoral conflicts. Electoral conflicts themselves are a promising topic of research, since their emergence is inevitable in any political system that provides for at least partially competitive elections. At the same time, due to the specific nature of such conflicts it is impossible to achieve even a partial settlement of them by existing (mostly legal) mechanisms, because such mechanisms are aimed only at assessing the formal circumstances of what is happening, are rather cumbersome and cannot always be applied due to, for example, the limited time available for the election campaign (and especially for the voting). This paper attempts to analyze the potential of mediation in this direction.