Constitutional forms of the nation’s activity in exercise of public authority

Constitutional forms of the nation’s activity in the process of executing public authority The aim of the paper is to present a complete and consistent classification of forms of activity of the nation as the collective subject of sovereign authority in the process of exercising public authority stipulated in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 2nd April 1997. The proposed typology of these forms is based on the uniform criterion – the legal effect of the formulated will of the community. Using this criterion leads to isolating two main dimensions of the above-mentioned activity of the nation. In the first of them, the nation acts as the actual sovereign and consequently, their acts of will have an absolutely decisive character. This occurs when – in accordance with Article 4 section 2 of the Constitution – the nation „exercises such power directly or through their representatives”, which means within the framework of so-called representative democracy (particularly electing their representatives and calling the previous mandataries to account for their achievements in the finishing term of office by means of the next election, and in the case of territorial selfgovernment bodies, also by means of the institution of revocability), or „directly” (by way of a referendum). All the other forms of social activity provided for in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland and otherwise involve the cooperation of citizens and groups of citizens in executing power by public authority bodies, both representative and non-representative ones. Due to their consultative power or merely inspirational character, they can be collectively referred to as „expressing opinions and providing inspiration in the matter of exercising public authority”.

The Realization of the volonté générale in the Representative Democracy System from the Perspective of the

Deliberations of Raymond Carré de Malberg The article concerns the comparison of the idea volonté générale proposed by J.J. Rousseau with the political solutions put forward by R.C. Malberg. The constitutionalist from Strasburg noticed some flaws of the political system of the French Third Republic. The flaws were connected with the lack of the efficiency of the connected with the supremacy of the parliament executive power. In the opinion of the scientist, in the reality of representative democracy, voting is often dominated by the party discipline and some quantitative criteria. Such an approach may favor the misinterpretation of the volonté générale, which should be treated as a qualitative category focused on the realization of the common good. The solutions proposed by Malberg aimed at strengthening the institution of referendum. The institution fully expressed the sovereignty of the nation and created the basis for the legitimacy of the political and legal system.

Citizen Initiated Referendum and Polish Referendum Law

The main aim of this study is to respond to the call to give citizens the power to initiate a referendum in a binding way. The key question in this context is whether such a postulate should not be treated as just a typical manifestation of political populism and thus rejected, or whether it should be supported by recognizing the institution of a referendum initiated by the citizens as a factor conducive to a more complete implementation of the idea of democratic rule, without threatening the destabilization and dysfunctionality of the political system. The analysis carried out in the article proves that this institution cannot be discredited because it should be seen as a necessary element of the process of exercising power in a democratic state. The proposed legal regulation may be conducive to achieving such a role in Polish political practice.

The subject of this study is to determine the mutual relations in which the creator of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1997 located the nation and the state. The text presents two opposing trends, showing how this relationship is perceived in the literature of the so-called Western countries and countries that have joined this group in recent decades. Arguments pointing to the empirical truth of the current presented by Polish representatives of science - the East European trend were presented. It was pointed out that the state is not an indispensable nation-building criterion, and thus that the state is not always primary toward the nation. Then, two concepts of the nation adopted in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland were presented, and it was shown that the expectations of the “political nation” and the “cultural nation” toward the organs of state authority may refer to completely different spheres of state activity.