THE RELATION BETWEEN THE POLITICAL SELF-IDENTIFICATION AND SOCIAL WELLBEING OF POLITICALLY-ACTIVE YOUTH IN RUSSIA

Abstract

this paper, we present the analysis of the relation between the political self-identification and social wellbeing of politically active youth in Russia. The method we used to study political self-identification included the identification of respondents' political views in the specter of ideologies representing the most established ideological and political trends in the public consciousness. We measured social well-being using a scale from 1 to 5 points to assess subjective satisfaction with the situation in the country in various fields. Although we measured the level of young people security: how do they assess their future - as confident or not? The political activity of Russian youth exists in two forms: "support" and "opposition"- whether they support the authorities or oppose them. Based on this principle, we surveyed two groups of respondents. The first group includes participants of youth organizations actively cooperating with authorities, as well as participants of regional Youth Parliaments, Youth Governments, Youth Public Chambers (active supporters, N=300). The second group includes those young people, which represent the modern youth protest, first of all, volunteers of the Progress Party and the Libertarian Party (active oppositionists, N=300). The study revealed that among active supporters, there are a lot of those who are not following any political ideology (40%) or cannot identify their political and ideological views (17%). Respondents with such position are quite a few among active oppositionists. The significant proportion of active oppositionists share liberal or libertarian views (51%). In both groups, radical views are not popular - almost no one identifies himself with the Communist or Nationalist ideology. We found that several wellbeing indicators have significantly different values in both groups. In particular, young supporters of the authorities are more secure: almost 80% of respondents feel security in one way or another, and only 16% are not secure, while among oppositionists, only 15% fell secure, and more than 80% of oppositionist respondents not feel security. The results of the survey showed that low levels of satisfaction, in general, characterize the social wellbeing of politically active youth. Politically active youth is most critical in the economic sphere of society. If we compare the social wellbeing of the two groups of politically active youth (supporting and opposing authorities), the indicators of satisfaction with the situation in the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of society among active oppositionists are significantly lower than those of supporters. We concluded that there is a relation between the social wellbeing of young people and their self-identification in politics: young people who identify themselves with liberal political views (close to the ideology of liberalism) express pessimistic social sentiment and sharply critical assessment of social wellbeing. Young people with uncertain or "blurred" political orientation, show more optimistic mood and satisfaction with the current situation.