Attitude to power as an element of social well-being (case study of the Vologda oblast)

Social well-being is a socio-psychological concept reflecting the application of an interdisciplinary approach when studying social processes and phenomena. In domestic science, there is a tradition to consider social well-being as an indicator of the success of social adaptation to changed conditions and its result. Social well-being is one of the indicators of social policy effectiveness which actualizes research in this area. Based on this, the aim of the work is to analyze such a component of social well-being as regional society’s attitude to the current government and to the political sphere as a whole. The information base of the research is made up of the public opinion monitoring data. The following results were obtained, in the long-term retrospective, the positive dynamics of the level of trust to the authorities, the assessments of the President’s activities success in solving a number of key tasks, the judgments about the political system are recorded. Nevertheless, the judgments about the authorities’ activities remain unsatisfactory. In particular, the confidence in public institutions is based on the relationship to the head of the state; none of the political parties expresses the interests of a significant part of the population; the proportion of the region’s residents believing that the President copes with the problems of the economy recovery and the population’s welfare remains low; the judgments about the Governor’s activities including his economic policies are becoming worse; the protest potential is not reducing over the last ten years, etc. All this gives grounds to assert that the current state policy is characterized by a low degree of efficiency, it is necessary to further improve the authorities’ activities to develop the living conditions of people in the region. This work contributes to the development of sociology clarifying the methodology of social well-being research and its approbation in the case of the Vologda Oblast.