Theoretical and Methodological Content of Legal Policy as an Instrument of State-Building

Abstract

The article analyzes legal policy as a key instrument of contemporary state-building from the perspective of a functional approach. It substantiates that legal policy cannot be reduced to a set of normative legal decisions or law-making activity; rather, it functions as an integrated political and legal mechanism that combines the strategic objectives of the state, institutional forms of their implementation, and practices of legal regulation of social relations. It is demonstrated that the effectiveness of state-building processes largely depends on the capacity of legal policy to ensure coordination among public authorities, civil society institutions, and social interests, including ethnopolitical.

Special attention is paid to the analysis of contemporary scholarly approaches to understanding legal policy, statehood, and state-building, as well as to the problem of conceptual ambiguity of these categories within the domestic political and legal discourse. It is argued that legal policy constitutes a structure-forming component of state-building, determining the direction and quality of institutional development of the state, the level of legitimacy of public authority, interethnic harmony and the stability of the political system.

The article systematizes the main approaches to public policy analysis presented in contemporary Western and Ukrainian scholarship and substantiates the expediency of considering public policy analysis as a multi-level analytical activity carried out at theoretical, applied, and methodological levels and integrating empirical, evaluative, and normative-recommendatory dimensions. It is shown that such an integrated analytical model provides a methodological foundation for employing legal policy as an instrument for rationalizing state-building processes, intercultural understanding and enhancing the quality of public governance under conditions of contemporary transformations.