The Article discloses the essence of the problem concerning the delimitation of the political and criminal responsibility for the further development of the public administration. It has been revealed that differences in the development processes of relations in the matter of the political responsibility are disclosed in terms of the quality of democracy, as well as redistribution of the responsibility between the central, regional and local levels of the administration. In different countries, it finds various manifestations: failure to comply with standards of democracy and abusing the criminal responsibility; attempts to avoid the criminal prosecution for the abuse of power being limited to the political responsibility; raising the level of the responsibility, in particular, criminal one, at the subnational level of the power organization. In the broad sense, all the manifestations confirm the conclusion on the «responsibility crisis» aggravation in the conditions of the democratic system of values. The growing importance of the political responsibility in the representative democracy and development of the regional and local democracy are substantiated. It is noted that the principles of the political and legal system of the state should create the basis for the separation of the political and criminal responsibility. First of all, this refers to the Constitution, which is a form of the contract between the state and society; such capacity of the Constitution demonstrates the functioning and maturity of democracy, and respect for the law in the state. The issue of punishment for political mistakes or divergences should be regulated, to a large extent, by procedures of the political accountability. The important task in this regard is to ensure the clear regulation of the accountability procedures of power entities for their activities. There is a need in clarification of the criminal legislation categories, such as «abuse of power», «abuse of office», and «abuse of authorities». Filling them with a clearer content can be done on the basis of clarifying certain criteria (for example, intention, negligence, personal benefit, etc.). The emphasis is made to the importance of realizing the fact that the practice of transition to the judicial examination of cases to be heard within the limits of the political responsibility leads, in particular, to decreasing the role of citizens in the expression of no-confidence against authorities when assessing their activities. Moving away from the idea of considering the political responsibility based on the assessment of voters and population leads to its «lock-in» on the responsibility of public power authorities with respect to each other, which threatens to deepen the irresponsibility and to enhance the leveling of people’s sovereignty.It is noted that the crisis of the responsibility has various risks for democracy at different levels of the public administration. For the Ukrainian practice, they are, in particular, linked with the containment of the process of introducing the representative and direct democracy standards. For countries with long-standing traditions of the democracy governance, it finds expression in the certain limitation of the democratic system as for finding adequate responses to meet the current challenges faced by society in the process of implementing the public authority.
Impediments to public consultations in the Polish local self-government
