Legitimacy of Public Authority in Russia

About the author:

Dmitry A. Avdeev, Cand. Sci. (Jur.), Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Department of Theoretical and Public Law Disciplines, University of Tyumen, Tyumen, Russia; ronner@mail.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4303-3614

Abstract:

Nowadays, when considering the democratic principles of Russian statehood, the problems of the legitimacy of the exercise of public authority come to the fore. Declaring people’s sovereignty and the principles of democracy, some difficulties arise in the implementation of constitutional provisions when public authorities exercise their powers.

This article compares interrelated categories of “legitimacy”, “sovereignty” and “demo-cracy”. The author analyzes the notion “people” and provides the constitutional legal analysis of its content characteristic. He concludes that the concept “people” is multifaceted and can be viewed not only from sociological and political positions, but also from the legal one. At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish between the participation of the people in the implementation of public power at various levels: at the federal, regional and local. This, in its turn, allows to talk about the different constitutional and legal status of the holders of power — the citizens.

Effective functioning of government bodies is possible not only in the case of their legal formation, but also, most importantly, in the case of their formation based on the will of the majority of citizens, which grants them the legitimacy. This article explores the constitutional foundations of the legitimacy of public authorities and concludes that their activities are in line with the political interests of the Russian citizens. The author has used a method of analysis and synthesis, formal-legal method and historical method of research.

This article has analyzed peculiarities in forming bodies of public power in Russian Federation. The author considers the problem of electorate’s possibility to express its political will by institutes of straight (immediate) democracy. According to these matters, the author makes a conclusion of conformity of the Russian legislation to the conception of democratic society system.

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