“Convertibility” of political identities of the youth as a political and scientific issue

The main idea of the article can be formulated as follows. Primary task of political science is to predict the future state of political processes based on a generalization of historical and modern data identified by a researcher. In relation to the task of analyzing political identities of modern Russian youth, it means that for a political scientist the goal of studying their current state is to predict various probable options for their future transformations and corresponding possible risks. Accuracy of the forecast is ensured by its method. The publication is proving the need to take into account, in the political science analysis of political identities, their predisposition to changes, which the authors conventionally designated as “conversions”. It’s a predisposition to the fact that within the boundaries of the concept through which a person’s consciousness determines the presence of a particular value in the motivations for their participation in socio-political life, an exchange of one meaning for another occurs. That is, to ensure that the key values, the connections between which transform civic identity into a system and tie it to other value foundations, do not lose their motivational significance for participation in politics in the conditions of radical changes in the latter. In other words, the essence of “conversion” is the transformation in the consciousness of a citizen of the previous meaning of the value foundations of political identification into a new meaning that is more adequate to the changed circumstances.

identity, political identification, youth, political values, political participation, conversion

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