ИСТИНА

The paper is devoted to citizens’ ideal representations of Russian president and their influence on a real leader’s perception. In the fall of 2019 two different qualitative studies were conducted: one was the study of Putin’s image in Russian society, the second was on the image of an ideal president. Methodology in both studies was comparable. This paper describes the contents and mechanisms of ideal president’s perception. The theoretical part of the study tackles ideal representations in the framework of various political, psychological and sociological approaches, focuses predominantly on the theory of political perception. In the empirical part, the image of Putin and the image of the ideal president are described and compared on three scales: attractiveness, strength and activity. The study permitted to find the commonality and differences in images of real and ideal presidents in the minds of Russian citizens and to conclude that ideal representations are responsible for the most deep level of political culture that determines people’s demands and expectations to the real presidents. Keywords: political perception, ideal representations, mass consciousness, image of an ideal president, image of V. Putin.