Political-psychological approach to the research of political values

The problem of values is one of the most ancient in the Humanities.It is difficult to define the phenomenon, which is called political values, because of its multiple meaning. Therefore, there aremany research approaches, which root on philosophical, sociological, political and psychological bases. Considering political valuesfrom the point of view of the political-psychological approach, we define them as political convictions and the purposes of an individualor the societies reflecting the steady positive importance of these or other meanings, principles and phenomena in their consciousness,being reference points in politics. There are two main forms of political values: group political values, which exist at the level of massconsciousness, and personal ones as cognitive constructs of each person. Political values represent cognitive components in the structureof individual and mass political consciousness. Both of them have psychosocial nature, they are formed during the political socializationprocess and are determined by its social and historical context. Political values do not exist separately, but they are characterized, first ofall, by their abstractness and hierarchical orderliness. Political values are under strong influence of stereotypes. As a rule, they are steadieragainst influences of changes of the political life context. They can be transformed only in case of a deep socio-cultural crisis. Politicalvalues mediate political perception. On the one hand, they have an impact on the personal opinion about different elements of a perceptibleobject, on the other one; they determine the expectations about them. Political values are not to be directly verbalized. They canbe indirectly revealed by special methods of the political-psychological analysis. The research of political values of contemporary Russiansassumes the use of a complex approach, which combines both political theories and psychological concepts. In this regard politicalpsychology solves most important problems, such as systematisation and development of existing approaches to political values research,and creation of the theoretical and methodological bases for applied research.

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