Although the political participation of contemporary college students tends to be pragmatic and rational, there are great differences in their participation consciousness and behavior. The main manifestations are as follows: first, college students have a strong sense of political participation, but less investment in participation behavior; Second, there are basically correct political cognition and political evaluation of society, but in actual behavior, there are differences between knowing and doing. The duality of this value orientation and the contradiction of value judgment directly affect the actual level and effect of college students' political participation.
2. Ideological and political contradictions among college students.
2. 1 The negative effects of market economy and the infiltration and erosion of bad social thoughts.
Domestically, the socialist market economy has not only promoted the rapid development of society, but also triggered a series of social problems. Reform and opening up provide good opportunities for college students, but some social unhealthy phenomena also have many negative psychological effects on college students, and they even feel the pain of social transformation. On the one hand, the blindness, spontaneity and lag of the market economy itself, as well as the negative aspects of the principle of interest and the principle of equal exchange, directly or indirectly affect the life value orientation of college students. Social evils such as moral anomie, mercenary, cheating, counterfeiting, and trading power and money have seriously corroded college students' thoughts. On the other hand, under the socialist market economy system, some people are allowed to get rich first, the income gap between people continues to widen, and the unfair social distribution intensifies. In addition, the society intentionally or unintentionally exaggerates the high-consumption life, which makes people's psychological imbalance and encourages the expansion of money worship, making more money and less money the main measure for many college students to measure people's value. At the same time, under the influence of globalization, decadent western thoughts, cultures and lifestyles with global ideology are infiltrating and spreading to developing countries all the time through various channels, which has a strong impact on college students' ideological and political understanding, making them confused in the face of the confusing capitalist values wrapped in the cloak of globalization, and it is difficult to distinguish between true and false, which eventually leads to the development of contemporary college students' value orientation from a single type to a diversified trend, and the value judgment tends to be practical and utilitarian.
2.2 The change of young students' own characteristics is an internal factor in the formation of their life values.
Due to the uncertainty of physical and mental development, contemporary college students also have obvious weaknesses, so we should pay attention to the problems caused by their life value orientation. Although most contemporary college students grew up in the period of great changes in reform and opening up, their long-term quiet life and heavy study pressure made them feel alienated from the real society. Their understanding of society is often superficial, illusory or theoretical, and they don't know enough about the nature of society, which leads to the situation of "seeing flowers in the fog" despite changes and forms the psychological characteristics of pursuing vanity and being unpractical. At the same time, due to the lack of age, knowledge structure, social experience and legal knowledge, college students will inevitably be influenced by some wrong views in the process of changing their values, which will cause some people to be politically confused, and even cause a few people to consider problems completely from the perspective of personal interests, resulting in some wrong political views and attitudes, which will further affect the normal development of mainstream political tendencies of contemporary youth.