Social Youth Networks and Political Socialisation

Objetivo

Youth political socialization (YPS) is undergoing a fundamental transformation in the digital age. While traditionally research has focused on the influence of socialization agents such as family, school, and mass media, today's adolescents more than ever before encounter political content within a complex, interwoven, interconnected social environment, offline and online, peer-to-peer, algorithmically curated and platform-driven. SYNAPS proposes a paradigm shift from linear, agent-centered models of political socialization toward a networked, relational, and dynamic understanding of how political engagement develops in adolescence. By capturing the longitudinal, multilayered peer and media networked ecologies in which young people become informed and interact, SYNAPS aims to uncover the mechanisms that drive the formation of political ties and the emergence of political engagement. It thereby responds to calls for dynamic, relational, and ecologically valid approaches to YPS. Further, SYNAPS yields novel critical insights into how interventions to foster youth political engagement may succeed in such highly networked environments. This offers a blueprint for the generation of evidence-based actionable insights for educators and policy-makers. Focusing on 14- to 16-year-olds in a variety of Austrian schools, the project combines partial sociocentric network data, social media data, and different types of qualitative interviews, supported by a participatory design component and resulting in an agent-based modeling simulation to test innovative network interventions. This integrated approach provides an unprecedented lens on how youth become politically engaged through their everyday interactions, both in classrooms and on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. SYNAPS redefines the study of youth political socialization by establishing a dynamic, networked, and intersectional model of how young people negotiate politics.