Abstract

Starting from the social representation theories, our paper proposes to identify some typologies of the leader in the current Romanian public space. The aim of this paper is to associate these typologies with the way citizens perceive and appreciate their leaders. According to Abric “representation is a guide for action, orienting facts and social relations, a pre-codified system of reality as it determines a set of anticipations and expectations” (Abric, 1994: 13). Viewed as forms of symbolization and interpretation, expression and construction, the social representations attributed to the leaders recompose and redefine the social reality determining changes at the level of public image so as to get closer to the social representations attributed to leaders. The purpose of this research is to make an inventory of the images that the leaders preserved during their political activity, and of the prototypes which suffered imagological changes at the level of public cognition