Russian Youth's Perception of the Moral and the Political in the Context of Their Sociopolitical Self-Identification

The article is based on the results of a study of the relationship between moral and political consciousness. The study was conducted to answer the questions of what factors determine the ideas of modern youth about the interaction of morality and politics, and how their ethical ideas affect the perception of political problems. The conceptual model of the study is based on the psychological understanding of young people's consciousness as a complex mental construct. Value orientations and ethical ideas existing in this construct's structure determine their attitude to politics. The empirical basis of the study was a questionnaire survey, focus group discussions, and expert interviews. The results of the survey show that, in the understanding of young people, moral norms should be the regulators of political relations. At the same time, the young generation's ethical ideas are abstract, poorly systematized, and largely dependent on a particular person's sociocultural or political orientations, which, in turn, are vague and fragmented. For the majority of the respondents, these orientations are based on very superficial knowledge about politics, political institutions, and specific political subjects. The perception of political events and processes, and the formation of their assessments from the standpoint of morality for young people occur on the basis of self-identification and categorization of socio-political subjects into “us” and “them”. As a result, in assessing political events, the actions of politicians or citizens, the dichotomy “own” - “alien” or “we” - “others” comes to the fore. The declaration of any actions as moral/immoral depends on how a young person identifies oneself in relation to the subject of actions in social or political terms, whether this subject is perceived as conditionally “own” or conditionally “alien”. For young people, “aliens” are often the authorities, their representatives, the state and its institutions, and “own” is an abstract image of the people, in a narrower sense, of people from their environment or politicians who declare support for the interests of the people (or society) against the state. The revealed tendencies in the formation of moral assessments of politics by representatives of the younger generation of Russians, together with the vagueness and fragmentation of their ethical ideas in general, can become the basis for active political manipulation, in which legal assessments are replaced by subjectively understood moral ones, and the arbitrarily understood significance of moral standards is used as arguments.

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