The constitutional nature of local self-government

Abstract

The relevance of the study lies in the importance of the functioning of local self-government bodies for ensuring democracy in European countries. The purpose of the study is to examine the constitutional foundations of the institution of local self-government, and the task of the study is to analyse the role of the European Charter in this process. The following methods were used in the study: induction, deduction, and abstraction. The main conclusion of the study is to argue that the European Charter launched a local government reform aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments as an independent level of public authority, as close to the population as possible. However, today, municipal authorities in many countries are fundamentally different from those that were created in previous years. This is primarily due to the lack of the necessary amount of own revenues to enable them to exercise their powers independently. The majority of municipalities need government assistance and intergovernmental transfers. The need to control the expenditure of state budget funds has led to the main trend in the development of local selfgovernment in the Republic of Azerbaijan being its integration into the vertical of public power.