Issue № 87. August 2021

Youth Policy as a Factor of Forming Russian Youth Civic Self-Consciousness: Political and Psychological Analysis

Antonina V. Selezneva
DSc (Political Sciences), Associate Professor, Department of Political Sociology and Psychology, Faculty of Political Science, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: ntonina@mail.ru
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2500-6356

Viktotia Ye. Zinenko
PhD, Deputy Chief Editor, “Special Forces of Russia” Newspaper, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: vickan@inbox.ru

Youth policy is an actively developing area of state policy in modern Russia. One of the directions of its implementation, enshrined in the recently adopted Law “On youth policy in the Russian Federation”, is the education of citizenship. This determines the need for a scientific understanding of youth policy implementing in our country in the context of the political socialization of youth and the formation of its civic consciousness. The purpose of the research presented in this article is to identify the problems and contradictions of the socialization influence of youth policy on the development of youth in the spirit of civic consciousness and patriotism based on the analysis of the characteristics of youth perception of youth policy. The conceptual and methodological basis of the study is the political and psychological approach, within which youth is viewed as a subject of socio-political processes, and youth policy as a factor in its political socialization. The empirical base of the study contains materials from 200 in-depth interviews conducted with young Russian citizens aged 18 to 30 years in 2020, as well as materials from 20 expert interviews conducted in 2020–21 with research scientists and youth workers. The results of the study show that in the minds of the respondents there are no clear and meaningful ideas about what youth policy is, what its goals and areas of activity are. On the one hand, young people mostly negatively characterize this policy, consider it insufficiently effective and think that it does not take into account the needs and interests of young people. On the other hand, representatives of the younger generation note the importance of youth policy and the need to build a constructive dialogue between youth and the state. The perception of youth policy is influenced by the youth negative attitude towards the state and the low level of trust to the authorities in general. Problematic issues that affect the quality of political socialization of youth by means of youth policy are difficulties in informing target audiences about programs and projects for youth, lack of citizenship models among young people themselves, insufficient historical, political and communicative competence of specialists working with youth, as well as substantive, organizational and technological mistakes in the field of civic and patriotic education. These problems significantly reduce the effectiveness of work on the formation of young people civic consciousness.

Keywords

Youth policy, youth, civic consciousness, citizenship, political socialization, civic-patriotic education.

DOI: 10.24412/2070-1381-2021-87-96-104