The concept of public administration in modern administrative law (comparative legal research)

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the category of “public administration” in Russian administrative law. The article argues for the development of this category’s comprehensive concept that would meet the needs of the Russian legal system’s modern advancement. The article considers the theoretical grounds for this concept in pre-Soviet administrative law, and diring the Soviet period. The authors reveal the category’s essential features, after analyzing contemporary Russian researchers’ ideas regarding its role and significance in dynamic Russian administrative law. Approaches to conceptualizing public administration in Russian and foreign administrative law are considered in the article and the authors contemplate the necessity and possibility of providing an integrative definition of this category as the basic concept of administrative law. Public administration is mapped within such concepts as executive and administrative power, government, state and municipal administration, public administration and governance. Public administration and governance are rationalized as paired categories within Russian administrative law theory. Within the framework of comparative law, the approaches to classifying the forms of public administration activities related to the implementation of administrative functions are analyzed. On the basis of the analysis, it is proposed to identify such forms of activities as intervening and facilitating public administration as well as public administration through services provision. The paper further considers specific features of public administration’s organizational structure and its types in the modern state. The authors conclude on the feasibility of developing and adopting a law on the federal public administration, and, on the basis of this law, to pass the regional legislative acts on the public administration entities of the Russian Federation.