The Influence of Ideal Political Views on the Perception of Various Leadership Roles

The paper is focused on Russian citizens’ ideal views on leaders playing different political roles. In the theoretical part of the paper the author analyses these ideal views in the context of various political, psychological and sociological concepts. The theoretical model is developed within the framework of political perception theory. 
The basis for the empirical part of the paper was the study of an ideal leader’s image in the mass consciousness of the Russians, conducted in 2020 in 11 Russian regions. It studied the images of the ideal president, governor and deputy. This paper describes the results and compares the views on ideal political leaders playing different roles. The results of the study revealed differences and similarities in the ideal images of three types of leaders, showed the correlation between the ideal and the real images, demonstrated the persistence of ideal images in the dee­pest layers of Russian political culture, and the influence of these ideal images on the perception of real political leaders.