Summary
Vardan P. Gevorgyan
Key words - social assistance, social policy, social security, social protection, archaic paradigm of social assistance, Christian paradigm of aid, state paradigm of aid, sociostate paradigm of aid, societal model of aid, social state.
For making effective reforms aimed at the social protection of the population including social assistance/ support it is very important to take into account the experience historically gained by the humanity in this field, the progress in shaping the modern social assistance systems and the underlying ideological and value systems. Otherwise even the kindest motivations for creating modern systems will not make it possible to avoid the old institutes of social assistance/support that did not survive to their goal, had no underlying particular ideological and valuable concepts and pursued just momentary goals. The policies, mechanisms and methods implemented through such institutes may at least bring to unnecessary waste of expensive resources and in most dangerous cases lead to deterioration of the state of certain groups in population by bringing about numerous undesirable consequences for the country and society going as far as undermining the public stability and causing turbulences. To support the current reforms in the social assistance to the population in Armenia the article entitled Historical and Theoretical Issues on Formation of Modern Public Social Assistance Support Systems through description of certain theories shows biosocial prerequisites of the phenomenon of social assistance/support, as well as presented the ideological and theoretical features of the main historically-shaped social assistance models (archaic, Christian, state, public and state paradigms of social assistance and societal assistance model).
The main conclusion following the analysis of the ideological and theoretical systems above is that at the current stage of reforms the Republic of Armenia should be guided by the welfare state doctrine. In this regard the most important scientific and practical task of the public administration system is to specify the state’s most preferable model or models .