The article examines the regional political agenda in small towns and districts of Ivanovo region through the application of content analysis to textual publications in social media, combined with Python-based computational text analysis. The analytical framework is oriented toward identifying the thematic structure, sentiment, and lexical dominants of the collected materials. The empirical basis of the study comprises 1,655 publications from 41 official and unofficial communities of the VKontakte social network, covering the period from November 15 to December 15, 2025. The research results indicate that the regional agenda is predominantly socially oriented, with a focus on the quality-of-life issues, civic engagement, and public events. Sentiment analysis reveals the prevalence of neutral and positive messaging, with a comparatively low proportion of negative content. Via lexical analysis, the authors identify the prevailing “general-tospecific” principle in the municipal communities’ postings, determine the dominant emphasis on issues related to childhood infrastructure development and education, and delineate thematic clusters which are likely to shape the future-oriented discourse. The authors also outline the prospective directions for the further research in this field.
For citation: Dokuchaev D.S., Dokuchaeva N.A., Strobykin K.A. Regional political agenda in small towns and districts of Ivanovo region: content analysis of social media, Ivanovo State University Bulletin. Series: Humanities, 2026, iss. 2, pp. 181—191.