Deliberative Practices in Municipal Law Making and Their Application in the Legal Examination of Municipal Legal Acts

This article is devoted to the consideration of the institutions of direct and deliberative democracy known to Russian municipal law. The author provides a description of deliberative democratic practices through discussion or communicative action. The author makes an attempt to distinguish the concepts of “direct democracy” and “deliberative democracy”. Using the example of various deliberative practices, such as public hearings, citizens' gatherings, citizens' conferences, public consultations as part of assessing the regulatory impact of municipal acts, etc., the particular importance of deliberative democracy in municipal rule-making is demonstrated. The final part of the article is devoted to the issue of using deliberative practices when conducting a legal examination of municipal regulations in order to identify the opinion of the population and predict social reaction to the introduced regulation.