Politically Salient Issues Before the Hungarian Constitutional Court. An Empirical Analysis 1990-2015

Most recently, political backlash against constitutional courts seems to be a more or less general phenomenon in several Central European countries. This backlash implicitly presupposes that courts have assumed power and authority to an extent which generated severe reactions of the dominant political actors of the country. Nevertheless, the question to what extent has this aggregation of power and authority constrained the dominant political actors in fact, has never been examined accurately and systematically in the literature. Since the JUDICON project (www.judicon.tk.mta.hu) elaborated a systematic method to measure the strength of judicial decisions, this paper will focus on the general question to what extent has the Hungarian Constitutional Court (HCC) constrained the legislation’s room for manoeuvre in politically salient issues between 1990 and 2015. Of course, selecting politically salient issues might generate some puzzle and might bring also some subjective element into the research. We have foreclosed, however, this subjective element by relying on the database of the Hungarian Press Agency (MTI): we have selected only those decisions of the HCC which generated any kind of echo from political parties, members of the government, Speaker of the Parliament or Head of the State. We assume that decisions which found their way into the political discourse and have been criticized or endorsed by the relevant political actors are certainly politically salient. By using the JUDICON dataset and selecting the politically salient decisions we will elucidate whether the HCC has indeed stalled highly important policy processes, or is it rather an empirically unfounded narrative propagated by legislative majorities (or executives) to rationalize their actions against courts. On the other hand, by comparing the average strength of politically relevant decisions of the HCC with the average strength of all decisions of the HCC concerning legislative activity might also reveal whether the HCC was politically sensible or not.