Artykuł koncentruje się na eksploracji najważniejszych czynników indukujących wysokie poparcie dla polityki Władimira Putina. Punktem wyjścia analizy jest charakterystyka rosyjskiego systemu politycznego, który determinuje określone relacje na linii Kreml – społeczeństwo rosyjskie. Mając świadomość, iż społeczeństwo rosyjskie nie jest monolitem, autorka kieruje uwagę na tę część rosyjskiej populacji, która deklaruje swoje poparcie dla działalności obecnego prezydenta. Uwzględniając szeroki wachlarz zagadnień dotyczących tego zjawiska stara się w tekście odpowiedzieć na następujące pytania: na jakie potrzeby i oczekiwania społeczne odpowiadają działania prezydenta? Dlaczego duża część społeczeństwa rosyjskiego nie widzi alternatywy dla Władimira Putina na stanowisku Prezydenta Rosji? W jakim stopniu wartości realizowane przez Kreml wpisują się w wartości uznane przez rosyjskie społeczeństwo?

W niniejszym artykule autor przedstawia problem kryzysu legitymizacyjnego współczesnej demokracji. Dane empiryczne wskazują, że obywatele wielu skonsolidowanych demokracji stają się dzisiaj coraz bardziej nieufni (cyniczni) wobec wartości, jaką jest demokratyczny system polityczny. Okazuje się, że problem ten dotyczy dzisiaj młodszych pokoleń obywateli. Autor próbuje odpowiedzieć na pytanie o to, jak młodzi ludzie (studenci) postrzegają i oceniają system polityczny w Polsce, także stara się przedstawić szerszy społeczny kontekst legitymizacji demokracji. Dlatego też analizuje związek pomiędzy preferowanym modelem władzy a poglądami na skali przekonań autorytarnych/demokratycznych.

Birthday Anniversaries of the Veterans of Communist Party of China in the Internal Politics of the People’s Republic of China

This article analyses functions of birthday commemoration of veterans of Communist Party of China. Content analyses of official ceremonial speeches and case study was applied to research ceremonies of 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong birthday and 100th anniversary of Xi Zhongxun, Hu Yaobang and Liu Huaqing birthdays. The study is based on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory. The results shows legitimizing function of those events – both of party rule over China and Xi Jinping leadership in the party.

Even though participatory budgets have rather short history in Poland criticism of its unwanted side effects have pushed some municipal authorities towards quick reforms of their initial visions. Most of them have decided just for small adjustments, but some have tried to be innovative and have reformed the whole mechanism. In this article, author attempts to take a closer look at consequences that accompany changes aimed at more quality of the whole procedure. The article aims to examine how more deliberation affects legitimization of participatory budgets. It is also an attempt to find out whether it brings expected outcomes within quality and profile of selected projects. Finally, we may learn here how people deal with more advance procedures. The analysis should serve anyone who is willing to search for new solutions among direct democracy tools in Poland.

The article aims at restoring local self-government as a research problem of political theory. In contemporary political science literature, local self-government is not treated as one of its normal, standard research problems. The main obstacle of its ambiguous position within political theory is, as I argue, the forced and imposed apolitical character of local self-government considered as a part of public administration. Despite some degree of organizational, especially institutional and legal, self-determination, the local self-government is not a political, i.e. sovereign entity. However, its non-sovereign status, which is legally established, does not exclude the existence of political potency in it.

The paper examines the conflict over the control of the integration of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (CT) that evolved into a constitutional crisis in October 2015 - and has extended for more than two years. It identifies issues that help understand how the Polish Democracy does not impede the erosion of constitutional democracy as the conflict has undermined the CT and the function of judicial review (JR). The article examines issues of legitimacy that emerge from the crisis; it also examines the extent to which the institutional settings condition the operation of the JR function; in particular, it looks at the role of executive actors (the Government and the President), and the role of the political/parliamentary party in bridging the separation of powers.

The aim of the article is to present the concept of legitimacy of power throughout history in philosophical, political, and legal thought. Particular attention is paid to confronting political and sociological views, which place emphasis on the social reception and acceptance of power, with the concepts of lawyers, for whom formal aspects are more important. The author also introduces the English-speaking reader to a different way of understanding the term ‘legitimacy of power’ among Polish researchers, which is a result not only of their original scientific concepts, but also of semantic differences between the term itself in Polish and English.

This paper aims to analyze selected mechanisms accompanying the processes of national revival in the Central Asian republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea is to investigate the authorities’ actions, which legitimized themselves by appealing to national issues and controlling the processes of building national consciousness. The paper also covers the changes in the nationalist narrative in Kazakhstan in the context of the war in Ukraine, showing the tensions over national identities and loyalties. Some Kazakhs supported Russian aggression against Ukraine, to the great disappointment of national patriots, which has sparked a debate about how the “us” vs. “them” division should be understood in the face of war and a possible threat from Russia. Some participants in the debate question the reliability of equating national identity with loyalty to the state. In doing so, they challenge the government’s primordial narrative, in which nationality legitimizes or naturalizes the current configuration of political power.