The development of small business is one of the prerequisites for strengthening economic democracy in Russia. In the" business-state" system, the entrepreneur acts as a person who assumes the function of risk and progress, while the state is the guarantor of reliability and stability. The author's multifactirial questionnaire was used to study the attitude of entrepreneurs to the state economic policy. To study the image of economic policy and the state used semi-projective techniques - modified semantic differential and the method of "Image of the State" (O. Deyneka). Small business entrepreneurs from the Leningrad and Smolensk regions of the trade business and farms took part in the study. The results of the study showed the dissatisfaction of entrepreneurs with the monetary and tax policy of the state. Also, some entrepreneurs did not show faith in overcoming corruption against the background of a generally positive attitude to economic policy. The image of economic policy is partly in the negative zone of semantic space, which is due to the presence of unsolved problems to date: for example, distrust between business and the state, as positive changes in the field of support for entrepreneurship began to appear relatively recently. The image of the modern Russian state was associated primarily with the figure of the "President". There are also associations with the concepts that embody the products of political labor: "legality", "social protection", "order", and with the function of "management", which indicates a positive image of the state as an institution of policy and, in particular, economic policy, among entrepreneurs of regional small business.