Political Preferences of North Caucasus Youth on Social Media: An Interdisciplinary Approach

While transmitting political information, digital platforms provide an environment for developing identities, norms, emotional attitudes, normative opinions, and ideas about the future. Young users express their political preferences on social media not through direct declarations, but rather through distributed and subtle indicators. The North Caucasus microregion has a complex configuration of sociocultural identities; here, political preferences cannot be reduced to one-dimensional indicators such as voting. Instead, they require reconstruction via a through analysis of distributed digital traces. This article theoretically substantiates, methodologically designs, and empirically verifies an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the political preferences that the North Caucasus youth population expresses on social media as distributed digital traces. Based on a synthesis of political socialization theories, a political-psychological analysis of attitudes, and digital sociology methods, the authors propose an integrative research model that combines the cognitive mechanisms of political image formation, discursive strategies for legitimizing meanings, the network topology of influence distribution, and the algorithmic logic of the platform environment. The resulting interdisciplinary framework includes four interconnected analytical contours: cognitive-political, discursive, network, and computational. The operationalization of youth political preferences is conceptualized as a process of reconstructing a latent construct through a multidimensional system of empirical indicators: the emotional modality of perceiving government institutions, the argumentation schemes used, legitimacy modes, symbolic codes of group identity boundaries, and the structural characteristics of network interactions (connection density, clustering, environmental homogeneity, etc.). Semantic and structural elements are verified through behavioral patterns of digital activity manifested as engagement intensity and media consumption patterns. The model ensures valid measurements through the cross-verification of semantic and structural data, minimizing the distortions inherent in both purely qualitative and formal quantitative methods. This instrumental basis makes it possible to monitor and forecast the socio-political dynamics of the macroregion, timely identifying new ideological contours and potential zones of tension.