Experts on Constitutional Conventions in Visegrad Group Countries

Constitutional conventions are essential components of democratic political systems. There is a tradition of scrutinizing constitutional conventions mainly in Commonwealth countries following an example of the political regime in the United Kingdom, which is based on very conventions and customs. Contrary to this, there is a major research gap on the issue of constitutional conventions in Central and Eastern Europe. Since constitutional conventions need a necessary time to emerge, they have been largely ignored by academics in post-communist countries in the past. This was due to a relative youth of the democratic regimes in the region. Nonetheless, the post-communist democracies celebrate more than 30 years of existence now, which allowed some constitutional conventions to already establish. Despite this, the gap endures. Political scientists and constitutional lawyers in academia are responsible for filling the gap in years to come. This fact makes their opinions crucial for establishing the solid grounds of the field. Thus, we built semi-structured questionnaires to discover what the experts in Visegrád Group countries think about constitutional conventions. In total, we have interviewed approximately 40 eminent political scientists and constitutional lawyers in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. The paper seeks two goals. Firstly, it reveals the experts’ understanding of the concept of constitutional conventions. Since we have interviewed experts from different fields and countries, it allows us to deliver a truly comparative study based on several dimensions of variation. Thus, we are going to discover the level of (dis)agreement about the concept of constitutional conventions within the fields in each country (intra-field national variation). Besides this, we are interested in the differences between political scientists and constitutional lawyers on how they conceptualize constitutional conventions (inter-field national variation). Last but not least, we expect substantial distinctions between the perception of constitutional conventions and their role across the four countries (international variation). The second goal of the paper is to summarize specific constitutional conventions identified by the experts in Visegrád Group countries. Similarly to the first goal, we will focus on all intra-field national, inter-field national, and international variations. To summarize, the paper proposes a complex picture of how experts from four different post-communist countries understand constitutional conventions.