A Systems Approach to the Concept of Demographic Legislation

Abstract

In the Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the Twenty-fifth Congress, it is stated that "development of an effective demographic policy is an important task for a whole range of natural and social sciences." Jurisprudence has a considerable role to play in developing and reinforcing the major propositions of a national demographic policy. The present period is characterized by the spread of family planning, i.e., conscious control of the number of children in the family in accordance with the reproductive attitude of the parents. The character of the attitude - the felt psychological need to have a given number of children - is in many respects governed by social norms. The demographic effect of the totality of normative documents influencing population dynamics and comprising demographic legislation cannot be assured, in our opinion, without taking into account the concepts and requirements of the systems approach. The systems approach to legal regulation of social relationships facilitates thorough analysis of the interrelations between legal and other social phenomena and provides the opportunity to discover the integrative connections, consideration of which in many ways determines the effectiveness of the requirements stated in norms. Systems analysis as a methodological approach identifies the systems concepts inherent in the object under study. Its basis is the proposition that "the specific character of a complex entity (system) is not exhausted by the features of the elements comprising it but is rooted above all in the nature of the connections and relations among particular elements," and the object of research itself is "a hierarchical, polystructural, multilevel entity." (1)