Russian political psychology: specifics and peculiarities of methodology

Abstract

The article deals with various methodological approaches in Russian political psychology. It is noted that political psychology is interdisciplinary in nature, and therefore, partially borrows and merges the methods of political sociology, history and other social sciences. On the other hand, political psychology has its own methodological peculiarities and features, determined by existing theoretical approaches. Thus, there are various clusters of researches devoted to the analysis of social consciousness, mentality, identity, psychological characteristics of the people, ethnical and social groups, political behavior and gender gap. The article analyzes the problems of the study of identity, political values, the influence of emotions on political behavior, political leadership etc. The authors propose to distinguish the study of the archetypes of collective unconsciousness and psychological origins of genesis and functioning of political myths as special and autonomous research fields. The authors believe that political psychology can become the basis not only for the analysis of psychological phenomena in politics but also can influence the vectors of development of legal and political culture in Russia. Thus, political psychology is important for the further development of political science, since it is the psychology that has the potential to study the depth of public consciousness, including existing and emerging images of power. The authors conclude that in contemporary Russian political psychology, despite the abundance of theoretical approaches, there is no single system or paradigm that could unite and streamline the theoretical diversity and create an interdisciplinary conventional methodological apparatus for studying the phenomena of political psychology.