Assessments of Activities of Public Authorities: Practice and Theory

The article is devoted to such a mass, but yet not researched, social and legal phenomenon as giving an assessment of the performance of public authorities and their officials. The main issues covered in the paper are as follows: the problem of using the term "feedback" in jurisprudence; the practice of giving feedback in the Internet, legal entrenchment of assessment of public authorities performance; recognition of assessments given by citizens as one of the categories of citizen's petitions; the problem of applying the legislation on citizen's petitions to assessments and feedback ; the problem of efficient processing and taking into account the information obtained by means of feedback. Main findings and suggestions: 1) the author defines a feedback as a particular form of a petition from a citizen that meets certain requirements and contains an evaluation of performance of public authorities or bodies of local government, as well as their officials; 2) the author analyzes ways of giving feedback available to citizens: by means of public Internet portals "Your Control" and "Public Services" using electronic terminals on the premises of public authorities and multi-function centers, as well as on the phone; 3) the author analyzes the normative regulation and practice of implementing each of the ways of giving an assessment; 4) on the basis of the analysis of features of citizens' petitions as a generic category it is proved that assessments are a special kind of petitions that are distinguished by their purpose (assessment of performance of public authority) and do not result in binding responses to them; 5) the author defined advantages of assessments as a form of feedback in comparison with traditional petitions (proposals, claims and complaints); 6) on the basis of an analysis of existing legal acts concerning assessments, the author concludes that it is not sufficient to regulate the institute by means of by-laws only because assessments in their form mean an exercise of the constitutional right to petition and the right to participate in managing state affairs of the Russian Federation (Articles 32 and 33 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation); 7) the author defines provisions of a draft Federal Law "On the assessment of the activities of the organs of state power and local self-government " in the part of regulation of the institute of assessments and its separation from other forms of citizens' petitions.

«Ваш контроль»

1. Савоськин А. В. Обращения граждан в Российской Федерации: понятие, виды и система законодательства. - М., 2015.