The article presents the results of the research of the pre-election discourse of candidates for governors of national republics during the last elections from the perspective of the concept of the institutionalization of ethnicity in the identity policy. The aim of the article is to determine the form of institutionalization of ethnicity in the electoral dimension of identity policies implemented in the context of the election campaign of governors and considering the ethnic structure of the republics' population. The research method is a comparative discourse analysis. The empirical data used are media content, election programs, and campaign materials of candidates from their social media accounts. The dominant form of institutionalization of ethnicity is a «symbolic model» in which ethnicity is defined as a symbol of the republic’s uniqueness. Dependence between the choice of such form of institutionalization in pre-election discourse and specifics of the national composition of the republic’s population does not occur in all cases. One of the most common forms of institutionalization of ethnicity is «predominantly without ethnicity». However, the interim governors rarely chose this model.

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Introduction: the inclusion of the language issue into the institutional agenda is a topical matter for Russia with its multiple ethnic groups speaking their native language. However, such an inclusion can be implemented in different forms and to a different degree, in particular, in the context of thematic government programs. The study attempts to determine the variability spectrum in the practices of including the ethnic minorities’ languages into thematic government programs texts in the multi-ethnic regions of the Russian Federation. Objectives: to identify models for including the language component into thematic government programs texts operating in multi-ethnic Russian regions, to understand the scale of the existing variability, taking into account the ethnolinguistic structure of the population in this regions. Methods: cross-regional comparative content analysis of thematic government programs in Russian multi-ethnic regions. Results: the presence of cross-regional variability was determined in the inclusion of the language component into thematic government programs texts of three types: the programs in the field of national policy, in education and in relation to the preservation, development and study of the regional languages. Four models of including the language component into thematic government programs texts have been identified: “all-encompassing”, “title-oriented”, “priority selective” and “ignoring”. No stable relationship between the specificity of the ethno-national structure of the Russian regions population and the variability of mentioning the languages in thematic government programs texts has been found. Conclusions: the variability of the language component inclusion into thematic government programs texts is manifested in the extent and depth of language topics coverage, therefore there is a need for an additional research through a qualitative comparative analysis of a selection of cases.