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КОНСТИТУЦИОННАЯ РЕФОРМА 2020 С ПОЗИЦИЙ ТЕОРИИ ЛЕГИТИМНОСТИ
The legitimacy is one of the key resources of stability for all political regimes but its importance growing still much in
regimes under transformation. The general legitimacy theory exposes why and how the dominant political class disposes
the trust of society to stay in power by using available symbolic, moral and legal resources of self-legitimization.
In contemporary law-based state the ground of the legitimacy is normally associated with the national constitution – its
fundamental values, principles and norms as well as with general public agreement on mode of their application by
government institutions and officials. Thus, each important constitutional revision means both the challenge to the
established legitimacy and an attempt to reconstruct it in new forms. The author analyses the impact of Russian 2020
constitutional reform in the transformation of the Russian political regime legitimacy. He exposes the reciprocal interconnections
between legitimacy and constitutionalism, regarding such items as positive and negative law-making
impulses; substantive and instrumental aspects of reform; national, regional and local dimensions; constitutional and
meta-constitutional parameters of the legitimization process as well as declared and undeclared reasons, motives,
arguments and political technologies of amending process. According his conclusion, the main result of the Russian
constitutional reform consists in the reconstructed legitimacy formula as a legal ground for consolidation of power
under transition process and a fresh start for the new form of constitutional authoritarianism.
Keywords: Legitimacy, Russian Constitution, 2020 Russian constitutional reform, constitutional amendments, positive
and negative legitimacy, substantial and instrumental legitimacy, national, regional and local dimensions of legitimacy,
constitutional and meta-constitutional legitimacy, amending process, legitimacy formula reconstructed, constitutional
authoritarianism