On the Problem of Politicians’ Image in the Public Consciousness (measurements from 1999–2016)

This article concerns methods of obtaining a view of the correlation in the public consciousness between the images of politicians in the country performing state administrative functions throughout various periods. A method of pairwise comparison was adopted to evaluate the performance of ruling functions by politicians in the interests of society, as well as the evaluations by respondents of the social intimacy towards one or another politician. This approach approximates the analysis of the semantic differential method, which allows for the measurement of the distance between images in the public consciousness. The result is the development of several historically indivisible semantic orientations of public consciousness, existing hidden ones and those not detectable by conventional methods. An additional result of the adoption of this method is the uncovering of signifcant amounts of those holding liberal, centrist and conservative public consciousness orientations. The analysis was performed using a unifed method on 6.5 thousand respondents between 1999 and 2016. A wide range of methods of mathematical analysis with a high level of reliability were used to uncover real behavioral and conceptual applications and stereotypes.