The “Nanny state” Phenomenon: A New Kind of State or a Modification of State Paternalism in Modern Conditions?
The article studies the practice of using the term " Nanny state" in Russian and foreign literature. As a rule, these are publications related to the fields of sociology, political science, and economics. The work attempts to highlight the content, which includes sources embedded in the corresponding concept and uses the terminological apparatus of legal science. It identifies its legally significant elements. The article is based on a retrospective analysis of the sources of law and legal doctrine of the end of the 19th Century. Therefore, it identifies those types of the state, which, according to their individual characteristics, can be compared with the state of the conditional type "Nanny state", namely: a police state, a welfare state and a paternalistic state. The purpose of the article is to show the importance of theoretical and legal identification of the “Nanny state” phenomenon based on the analysis of foreign experience and Russian practice by correlating the features of the “Nanny state” type with the features of a welfare state, a police state and a paternalistic state. The methodology combines formal legal analysis of the text of regulatory legal acts and methods of system analysis, forecasting and modelling, as well as the comparative legal method as the basis of the study. The research results are: the systematic characteristics of the “Nanny state” phenomenon are given; shows the history of the introduction into publicistic use of the corresponding term and its use; the directions of doctrinal comprehension of the phenomenon of "Nanny state" in the framework of theoretical and legal science, taking into account the historical experience and data of other sciences; gives a predictive description of those changes in actual relations in connection with the expansion of the number of legal regulation spheres, in which the approaches are typical for the state in terms of the conditional type “Nanny state”. As a result, it is concluded that the use of the term “Nanny State” testifies to the emergence of a new type of state, in which the features of both the police state and the social state are combined, but by its nature the “Nanny state” is a special form of implementation of the principle of state paternalism.