Legitimacy of State Power: Historical and Theoretical Aspects

The legitimacy of state power is a category that determines the value content of the state and law. The article describes the historical and theoretical scientific development of the legitimacy of state power, as well as the practical principles of the constitutional and legal legitimization of public power in the context of the rule of law. The author traced the evolution of legitimacy as a legal and political concept, as well as reviewed the main approaches to the legitimacy of state power in the doctrines of natural law and legal positivism. The legitimacy of state power is established through the criteria of human rights and democratic participation of citizens in the political process. In a democratic state, the basic law of the state is a mechanism that relies on the principle of popular sovereignty as a condition for the legitimacy of state power. It determines the place of constitutional jurisdiction bodies in the system of guarantees of legitimacy. Civil society and state power interact in the legitimacy context. The category of legitimacy can be introduced into the state-legal theory as a fundamental property of state power. As such, it may improve the constitutional mechanism for the legitimization of state power.