Considerații privind influența principiului subsidiarității asupra participării cetățenilor la viața publică locală
Considerations on the Influence of the Principle of Subsidiarity on Citizens' Participation in Local Public Life

Summary/Abstract: The principle of subsidiarity has been the object of numerous papers concerning its aptitude to reinforce local autonomy in the legal systems in which it operates, due to its capacity to explainand justify certain decentralizing reforms, certain transfers of administrative powers from the central authorities to the local ones. This paper aims at showing that, apart from this kind of influences over the local autonomy, somehow objectively identifiable in the legal systems taken into consideration, subsidiarity is, moreover, likely to justify, indirectly, the consecration, in the same legal systems, of certain forms of participatory democracy in the sphere of local public administration. The consecration of the local decisive referendum in France may serve as an example. The novelty represented by this kind of referendum in the French institutional framework is due to the influence of an ontological element of subsidiarity–the philosophy of action – which is able to inspire a new form of citizenship, more active and efficient than the one manifested exclusively on the occasion of political suffrages. Introducing new forms of participatory democracy in the local public life reinforces, in its turn, local autonomy, while emphasizing the fact that the decentralization of powers and the development of the citizens’ implication in the administrative life of their communities, must go together.

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