Categorical System of Political Leaders Perceptions of Russian Universities’ Students

The study was conducted due to the necessity for prognosis of political processes taking place in the society as well as for the focused choice of “the model of proper future”. The results of a student sample survey (298 respondents of both genders) of a number of Russian universities during the period of 2016–2018 were analyzed. The psychosemantic method “The Image of a Political Leader” (IPL) was used to evaluate a number of political leaders from different countries of the world, living both nowadays and previously. The psychosemantic methodology proved to be effective in studying the implicit, poorly reflexive categories of consciousness. The significance of unconscious and conscious processes in political perception are obvious, psychosemantics contributed greatly to the analysis of political reality events and processes. On using the exploratory factor analysis five factors - categories of perception of the images of political leaders - were singled out. Two of them were universal, viz. morality, charisma; three others were situational, predetermined by the evaluated personages and the current social situation: authoritarianism, globalism, and statism. Morality and charisma had positive connotations in the students’ mind, while the attitudes toward authoritarianism, globalism, and statism were ambivalent. The distributions of the images of political leaders in each of the categories were constructed. The correlations between separate pairs of categories, viz. between morality and charisma, authoritarianism and statism were analyzed. The projections of semantic space on the plane formed by these pairs of categories were constructed.