Dec. 23, 2019, 3:33 p.m.

Editor’s Letter

Editirial column

Dear colleagues and friends,
We continue to expand the array of topics covered by our journal on our way to becoming a multidisciplinary publication. While our first issue was dedicated to matters of political science, the second issue deals with a number of legal matters.
Arkady Lyubarev starts the issue with a paper describing the ways electoral law interacts with other branches of science, political and social sciences specifically. We hope that this will be a good start for other multidisciplinary papers finding their way into our journal.
Valentina Lapayeva’s paper discusses passive suffrage restrictions, which is a very important legal aspect of Russian elections. The paper will be a great contribution to the ongoing discussion that has a clear political undertone. The author approaches the issue with clear legal reasoning, which is extremely important for the discussion.
Andrei Buzin presents an analysis of using ballot paper processing systems, which is a technology developed for tallying election results. There is no way elections could avoid digital and technological progress, although they will prove their worth only when they help increase election credibility. The author uses mathematical methods in order to solve the issues at hand, which is currently unconventional for legal studies.
Yurii Korgunyuk once again addresses the issue he raised in his previous paper aimed at developing a set of instruments for measuring electoral cleavages. The new paper analyses the structure of electoral and political cleavages on a regional level.
Yekaterina Marmilova's paper looks at the 2019 elections in Spain, which were held on all levels from European to municipal. It examines various aspects of previous campaigns, such as the features of the electoral system, party system, voting and election results as well as differences in results between levels.
I hope the new issue will take our journal to a new level and the array of topics and authors will only continue to expand.
Arkady Lyubarev