Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2025 number 2

In recent years, in Russia one observes an increase in the number of administrative complaints about housing and communal services. The increase in the number of appeals may be caused by various factors not directly related to the state of housing: institutional contradictions, new forms of competition in the market, public sentiments, etc. The communication component of the complaint remains unchanged. However, the transition to a new form of interaction through digital state portals may have affected the ways of information delivery and the rules of communication between complainants and responsible persons. The purpose of this article is to identify changes in the institution of administrative complaints during the transition to state digital portals. Using the program written by the author, an automated data collection of 670,000 complaints about housing and communal services in 17,000 apartment buildings on the portal “Nash St. Petersburg" was conducted. It was established that the simplification of filing complaints on the digital portal led to the formation of a “‘gray mass" of appeals, for which there is no clear geographic focus and unity of issues. The gray mass includes complaints of “‘activists " and residents with non-typical single appeals. The main increase in the number of complaints is not due to new users of the portal, but due to the increase in appeals from activists, who account for up to 80% of the total number of complaints. A transformation of the rules of filing and reviewing complaints has been revealed, which allows the institution of administrative complaints to function in a relatively new environment. The portal administration develops new mechanisms to curb the flow of appeals, filtering contentless complaints, focusing on the most problematic issues. Residents instead of generating an excessive volume of complaints cooperate around previously submitted appeals, confirming the relevance of the problems. This mechanism greatly increases the level of satisfaction of residents with solving the reported problems. The results of the study allow us to identify the transforming elements of the institute of administrative complaints, new drivers and barriers to developing this communication tool in the present-day Russia.