Responsibility of Local Self-Government Bodies towards the Population and the State: Theory and Practice in Light of Municipal Reform

This paper examines how the 2025 municipal reform affected the institution of early termination of powers of local self-government bodies, particularly regarding the application of measures of constitutional and legal responsibility measures to them. A distinctive feature of the new law in this part was the abandonment of the well-established concepts in legal science and judicial practice of local self-government bodies' responsibility «towards the population» and «towards the state». The paper uses formal-logical, functional and contextual approaches to thoroughly examine the material and procedural aspects of the updated institutions of accountability in order to assess the content and potential of the new legislative provisions. The analysis shows that despite the formal exclusion of these concepts from the law and the serious restructuring of the legislative text in this part, the responsibility of local self-government bodies towards the population and the state is not called into question as a legal phenomenon and constitutional-legal concept. Particular attention in the article is given to the classification of grounds, specifics of implementation procedures and the legal consequences of certain forms of early termination of local self-government bodies' powers according to the new law. The combination of doctrinal analysis with the examination of illustrative, including little-known cases of judicial practice on these forms of early termination of powers made it possible to develop of a number of specific useful practical recommendations and highlight key features of the relevant legal norms in their updated form.