Procedural Fairness, Legitimacy and Effectiveness: The Hungarian Case

In the general elections of 2010 in Hungary, the socialist-liberal government was ousted and Fidesz, a conservative party, secured a constitutional (two-third’s) majority in Parliament. Using its comfortable majority Fidesz started large-scale institutional reforms, including even the adoption of a new constitution. Several policy and institutional areas have been also fundamentally reformed, like the system of social benefits, the rules and institutions of local governance, the educational system, the media authority, the electoral system – just to name a few. However, the legitimacy of those hasty reforms is far from being obvious. The paper uses the approach of Tom Tyler and others who argue that perceptions of procedural fairness are crucial in the formation of legitimacy beliefs. Tyler also argues that people do not obey the law and assist in implementing policies because they fear the sanctions but because they put trust in them and think that they are legitimate. That is, legitimacy spurs law-abiding behaviour and makes policy implementation easier, which is a condition of effective policy making. Our assumption is that the way reforms have been adopted in Hungary has violated a number of basic procedural fairness norms, like that of voice and participation. We also assume that Hungarian people are just as sensitive to procedural fairness as Americans or Western Europeans are. Therefore we expect a discontent in terms of procedural fairness, and, as a consequence, falling trust in, and legitimacy of, state policies and institutions. The most recent wave of ESS (2010) data seems to confirm our hypotheses. Moreover, through a survey research we intend to demonstrate that the perception of procedural unfairness is related to uncooperative attitudes towards policies and institutions. The paper therefore aims at establishing the conceptual and empirical links between procedural fairness, legitimacy and institutional effectiveness.