Kasamara Valeria Alexandrovna

The article discusses the influence of contemporary Russian YouTube bloggers on the political views of school students. Based on the analysis of quantitative (survey of adolescents, N=500) and qualitative (257 in-depth interviews) data, the article identifies the authors of the most popular YouTube channels as well as analyses the reasons for their popularity, including the key factor based on their tactics of building trustful relationship with their audience. The second part of the article examines the content of popular videos taking into account its political context. Although most of the videos popular among pupils contain entertaining and comic content, bloggers repeatedly appeal to political topics in their comments and remarks. All the political content can be categorized as follows: reaction to the current political context, the image of modern Russia and its problems, as well as the views on patriotic education. The videos of YouTube bloggers cause a strong emotional response among young people for several reasons: they address adolescents’ issues of concern and appeal to values shared by teenagers: accessible education, fight against corruption, ecology, pacifism.

The article is devoted to exploring the process of political socialization of the Russian schoolchildren, within the framework of which his civic competence is formed. Civic competence includes such components as socio-political knowledge, social activity, willingness to take responsibility and patriotism. In the empirical part of this work, a cluster analysis was carried out on the data obtained during face-to-face survey (N=2610). Schoolchildren were divided into 3 clusters: “pessimistic excellent students”, “paternalistic good students” and “activist poor students”. More detailed characteristics of the clusters were identified on data obtained during interviews with survey participants (N=256). The analysis showed there are no single approach to raising the level of civic competence of pupils. “Pessimistic excellent students” need educational technologies that would increase the involvement of these children in events of social significance. “Paternalistic good students” need to increase their level of responsibility, and “activist poor students” need to systematize basic knowledge about the socio-political reality of Russia.