Our paper investigates the functioning of the Hungarian Constitutional Court after the post-communist transition period. The paper has two aims: first, we empirically examine to what extent the HCC constrained the Hungarian parliament’s room for manoeuvre in legislating. This descriptive part of the project is relevant since it breaks with the traditional binary way of analyzing judicial decisions (constitutional/unconstitutional) and provides a typology of the strength of judicial decisions. This part of the project explores how the Constitutional Court used its formally outstanding power. Second, the research project offers explanations to the decisions of the HCC and to the role its judges fulfilled: we analyze the internal and external factors that could play a part in the decision making processes. To answer these latter questions, we use research methods and hypotheses based on the international literature partially modified and adopted to the Hungarian context.
