Political participation is considered as one of the most important indicators of a democratic system, which is why a new participation channels are being developed nowadays. One of them is the world wide web and within it, ever-present social networks that can influence political participation of young people. The goal of this research is to present social networks as one of the mechanisms for increasing and strengthening youth political participation, using the focus group method. With the qualitative research, conducted on a sample of young people aged between 20 and 28, I wanted to see the characteristics of youth manifest participation and the role of social networks on it. In doing so, I also relied on youth practices of online political engagement. The conducted research showed that young people, despite their strong support to protesting actions, consider formal participation as the most important way of political participation. I also found out that encouraging youth manifest political participation is partly influenced by social networks, which serve young people as a space for political information, despite them being politically passive, when it comes to their online engagement practices. Although young people agree that social networks can to some extent contribute to greater manifest participation, they also emphasize that this is only one of the factors that can most effectively work in combination with political interest, knowledge and tendency for social changes.
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