In the master’s thesis, we focus on exploring the role and importance of the image and reputation of political actors in the context of modern democracy. We see the image and reputation as two of the key determinants, based on which inconsistent and independent voters and citizen generally decide to whom to give their vote at the elections and loyalty in a longer period of time. It is a fact that modern voters distance themselves from political parties and follow more short-term decision-making motives, like image, personality and success of the political actor. In the 21st century, modern democracy is thus at a crossroads because we are witnessing political passiveness. Political actors thus increasingly turn to political marketing tools for the mobilization of citizen in order to win the elections and remain in the political arena for a longer period of time. They use political marketing to identify the needs and desires of voters, based on which they then build the image and reputation of the political actor. The goal of the master’s thesis is to find out the role and importance of building the image and reputation of political actors (in different approaches of political marketing) in modern democracy, identify the trends of modern democracy with focus on policy personalization, within which we will analyse the importance of image and reputation, theories and models for image and reputation building and offer a systematic model for image and reputation building, which can be applied in practice. In this field, we namely perceive a lack of researches, since the majority of authors recognize the importance of the image of the political actor in the voter’s decision-making process, but neglect the conceptual understanding how the image is even built and which techniques and strategies are being used in this procedure.
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