Latent policy is a secret policy locked away from prying eyes covering both negative and positive effects. It allows to see the political life not within the limits of the idealized approach but more realistic. Safety the adequate response to the challenges struggle for survival and competitive outrunning – these are the main sources and the core of latent policy. The analysis of its nature characteristics and mechanism is the subject of a new special political science – polit-ical latentology. In this regard there is a fundamental question about the possibilities and methods of studying latent policy. In social consciousness at the commonplace level it is formulated as follows: «How can you explore something hidden and what possibly does not exist?..». The article is devoted to the methodology of the hidden policy study. First of all the attention is focused on the meth-odological foundations of the latent policy study: its subject philosophical approaches to the analysis of latent policy the basic theory of political latentology and specific methods for studying hidden policy