Article

Received 10.03.2025

Revised 02.05.2025

Accepted 01.06.2025

Retrieved from Vol. 9, No. 1, 2025

Pages 9 -18

Kravchenko, L., & Saienko, O. (2025). National consciousness and national legal culture: Issues of formation. Ukrainian Professional Education, 9(1), 9-18. https://doi.org/10.33989/2519-8254.2025.17.342358

National consciousness and national legal culture: Issues of formation

Liubov Kravchenko Oleksandr Saienko

The article is devoted to a theoretical and analytical understanding of the relationship between national consciousness and national legal culture through the prism of the problems of their formation in modern Ukraine. The starting point is the interpretation of national consciousness as a multi-level system of cognitive representations, emotional loyalties, and attitudes toward belonging to a political nation, while national legal culture is viewed as the institutionally mediated ability of society to reproduce the rule of law through the internalization of norms, procedural rationality, and trust in public authority. Legal consciousness is identified as the central mechanism for translating identifying meanings into legal practices, and the external contour of verification of this translation is the standards of the rule of law (legality, legal certainty, prohibition of abuse of power, equality, access to justice), which translate the discourse on «culture» from the level of metaphors to the dimension of observable procedures and behavioral effects. Methodologically, the work is based on a combination of an institutional approach, comparative legal analysis, and critical reading of empirical studies, which allows us to reconcile historical and civilizational layers with the constitutional and legal framework and assess the impact of educational, judicial, and communication channels of socialization. The focus is on the problems of formation. It is shown that the key obstacles are concentrated in three interrelated blocks: institutional incompleteness and fragmentation of policies, which create a gap between the norm and its intended application; a deficit in socialization infrastructure – uneven legal education, regional asymmetries, weak participation practices; insufficient routinization of fair procedures at points of daily contact between citizens and the state, which undermines trust and reinforces tolerance for informal norms

national consciousness, national legal culture, legal consciousness, rule of law, legal socialization, institutional trust, legal order
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https://doi.org/10.33989/2519-8254.2025.17.342358