Sharing Economy in Russia: A Possible New Source of Political Participation and Democratization?

Introduction. Scientific understanding of current and future trends in the development of society, the formulation of problems of social development, and even more so its prediction is associated with the analysis of the role and place of modern and promising communication technologies in the complex architecture of social interactions. Today, such technologies determine the direction of restructuring traditional political and economic institutions contribute to the formation of fundamentally new formats of social interactions. The beginning of the 21st century was marked by a wide spread of sharing relations – old socio-economic practices of joint (shared) use of goods in a new technical and technological design. The driver of the development of joint consumption practices has also been the spread of global trends in the transition from a system of strong fundamental links between socioeconomic entities to weaker but numerous temporary links. Methods and materials. In the course of the study, the sharing economy was considered through the prism of structural-functional, neoinstitutional and network approaches. The authors used system analysis, interdisciplinary and empirical methods (questionnaire, expert survey), as well as the method of social modeling. The materials for the study were the publications of leading foreign and domestic researchers of the issue in peer-reviewed scientific publications, as well as the results of a cross-regional sociological study conducted by the authors. Analysis. Currently, an institutional formation of a new ontological reality within which self-regulating, more autonomous from the state, sharing communities built on the network principle function is taking place. Through the liberalization of access to a wide range of benefits through low-cost channels, sharing contributes to the growth of trust, social well-being, and reduction of social tension. At the same time, the uncontrolled spread of sharing practices is fraught with a drop in the level of institutional and interpersonal trust, an increase in conflict in society, and the deformation of regional and sectoral labor markets, which will naturally affect social well-being and political stability. Results. The obtained results confirmed the hypothesis of the study that the practices of joint consumption in Russia have a pronounced development potential and a growing influence on the political sphere through the growth of political activity of the population participating in these practices, through the actualization of microsocial contracts and the subsequent translation of their content to the macro level.