Politically active youth: strategies of political participation in the context of the social future image

The research focuses on a certain aspect of political activity of young people - the image of the social future. The target sector is young people who actively manifest themselves in the social and political sphere: pro-government and opposition-minded groups of young people. The image of the social future is considered as one of the key components of the social well-being of young people reflecting their ideals and expectations. At the same time, the choice of the strategy of active political involvement of young people is analyzed through the prism of subjective states - mood, well-being, expectations.Two groups of respondents took part in the survey: activists of pro-government organizations, as well as regional youth parliaments, governments, youth public chambers (n = 300); representatives of modern youth protest, primarily volunteers of the “Progress party” and “Libertarian party” (n = 300).Ccomparing the images of the desired and expected future of politically active youth, a mismatch between their social ideals and the expected direction of events in the future was revealed. It mainly concerns the prospects for economicdevelopment and is much more pronounced among opposition activists. For opposition youth, the contradiction between the desired and expected future, in addition to the dissonance in economic development, affects the sphere of legal relations: an important landmark is a humanistic societytolerant ofminorities, and the most likelyexpected event is the restriction of the rights and freedoms of citizens. The imbalance between social ideals and social expectations causes pessimistic attitudes among young people and dissatisfaction with the current situation in various spheres of life.Such circumstances of the choice of the strategy of political participation as orientation to the social ideal, ideological and political identification, readiness for conflict behavior are revealed. All of them simultaneously act as watershed lines between groups of pro-government and opposition activists.The image of the social future determines the choice of the strategy of political participation implemented by young people. “Active adaptation”, more typical for a group of pro-government youth, involves the use of the mechanisms proposed by the authorities to engage them in politics. The “activist-protest” strategy is implemented by opposition-minded youth, its important indicator is the willingness to go to conflict in various life situations. As a forecast, the authors put forward the following thesis: with the declining level of social well-being, among politically active youth, the number of transitions from state-approved forms of political participation toprotest ones will increase.