The era of individuation, personalization of politics, professional image management, and political branding has brought to the fore issues of personality in studies of political leadership and electoral behavior. Advanced perspectives in political psychology suggest voters tend to cling to leaders whom they perceive to be similar to themselves in terms of personality profile (Caprara, Zimbardo, 2004). The emphasis on personality dispositions and personal preferences (Mondak, 2010; Gerber et al., 2011), challenges traditional sociological models of political affiliation and partisanship (e.g. Michigan school). Has “the personal” taken over “the ideological”? The paper proposes negative answer, founded on the empirical study of voter’s ideological identity as an imminent intermediate between political image and its public perception. The panel data on the popular perceptions of major party leaders’ personalities (24 traits) in Lithuania (August-September, October-November 2012; N1=1019, N2=1009), measured by means of semantic differentials, shows that the impact of voter's value orientations on leader’s evaluation should not be underestimated. The perception of leader’s personality emerges as the function of the congruence between voter’s and political leader’s ideological profile on the Right-Left continuum. The ideological bias of voters significantly influences perception of political personalities: Left-wing respondents reported positive image of Left leaders’ on a number of personality dimensions, contrarily to their negative perceptions of leaders on the Right; adherents of the Right declared exactly opposite views. Statistically significant results lead to the conclusion that, in spite transformation of contemporary political environment, the salience of the normative dimension of political leadership has not diminished. “The veil” of ideological identity mediates and moderates the impact of image and personalization on voters’ cognitive maps of political competition. The paper also invites for further conceptual elaboration of the complicated relationship between notions of ideological orientations, political and personal values, and personal traits.
