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ABSTRACT
Young people are considered to be most disengaged age segment when it comes to politics and political issues. To increase the level of political participation of young people is a socially desirable goal, especially considering the fact that they are the ones to shape the future of politics. The impact of Internet and new media development mostly effected younger generations and it can be presumed that new media, such as social networks, will continue to have a significant role in their lives. Thus, social networks can be an effective media in strategies that are aiming to increase political participation among young people. The purpose of this research is to determine to what extend do young people use social media for discussing politics and does using social networks for political information influence their online and offline political participation. The survey was conducted using online questionnaire among young people between the ages of 15 to 29. Results have shown that using Facebook for accessing and discussing political information has a positive influence on the intention for both online and offline political participation. The influence is, expectedly stronger in the case of online political participation. Twitter, however, has shown to have a significant influence on online political participation, but not on offline political participation of young people.
Keywords: offline political participation, online political participation, social media, youth
1.INTRODUCTION
Social networks can easily be explained as "a group of Internet-based applications built on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 that allow creating and exchanging usergenerated content" (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). The presence of social media can't be ignored, and the daily increase in number of users can be seen in a simple example of Facebook. In 2015 there was one billion active daily users, and today Facebook can be proud of averagely 1.32 billion active users every day (data taken for June 2017) (Facebook official site, 2017). 1.23 million people represents one sixth of the total world population and when only one type of social media (in this case Facebook) has so many active daily users, it is easy to conclude that the impact of social networks on people and their everyday lives really exists. Shirky (2011) explains the importance of social media in society...