THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF RESEARCHING THE SOCIAL ACTIVITY OF YOUTH

Abstract

The thesis approaches youth social activity from an institutional and cultural perspective and asks why the traditional institution of hashar has lost its capacity to convert readiness into collective action in a country whose median age is 27 and whose internet penetration exceeds 89 per cent. Four pillars of mobilisation – the call, the address, the result and the recognition – are isolated and operationalised through the civic voluntarism model of S. Verba and colleagues, E. Ostrom's boundary principle, A. Bandura's collective efficacy, P. Bourdieu's symbolic capital, M. Granovetter's threshold model and A. Hirschman's exit–voice–loyalty scheme. The empirical core is a most-similar-systems comparison of two national platforms: of more than 6,900 appeals submitted to the «Mening fikrim» portal only 495 (7.2 per cent) reached the voting stage, whereas voting in the «Initiative Budget» grew from 87,700 citizens in 2019 to 10.28 million in 2026, a 117-fold increase. The difference is attributed to institutional design rather than to values, motivation or technological access, and a «digital hashar» model with four measurable indicators is proposed.