Perception and image management in political leadership

Looking at the history of mankind, it is seen that there are leaders who manage groups since the day they started to live together. All countries governed under democracy have political parties, and each party has a leader. The image drawn by the leader in the election processes directly and greatly affects the votes received by his/her party. In this context, the image studies that political party leaders will create in the public's perception have become the subject of scientific research. The main purpose of this research is to examine the perception and image formation processes in political leadership and to determine the dimensions of leader/party dependency in the eyes of the voters. For this purpose, quantitative and qualitative research methods were used together in the study. After clarifying the main issues with the literature review, the data obtained via the internet from a sample group of 480 people were analyzed. As of the period of the study, it was decided to collect the data via the internet due to the security measures in effect in order to prevent the global Covid epidemic. The questionnaire forms used in the study were compiled from the Doctoral Thesis studies conducted by Temizel (2012), Tatar (2007) and Kaleli (2014), and were put into practice by taking expert opinion on the selected questions. SPSS statistical program was used in the analysis of the data collected via Google Forms. As a result of the reliability analysis of the collected data, the Cronbach's Alpha value was found to be 0.889 and it was accepted that the data had a high level of reliability. As a result of the analyzes, it was concluded that the image of the political leadership is very important in the eyes of the voters and that the voters have a high level of loyalty to the party leaders.