Testing Approaches to Studying the Content of Municipal Strategies

The paper presents results of a pilot study of 100 documents on long-term strategic planning of municipal units. We characterize the texts basing on a devised codifier which describes economic and social parts of strategies, infrastructure development issues and implementation of a strategy. We pay special attention to “ambitious” character of a document and priorities towards “flagship projects”. As a result of cluster analysis, we have defined three following dense groups of strategies: ambitious realistic (good), unambitious realistic and ambitious unrealistic (populist) ones. The big number of strategies of the first cluster (54) allows us to say that Russian municipal strategies are of considerably high quality. Through the content analysis of the documents using lexical markers, we prove that the strategies are thematically differentiated and find out that a series of topics is assigned by the federal authorities