Gabriella Ilonszki – Péter Ondré – Réka Várnagy: Majority dominance and its consequences in the Hungarian Parliament
Proposal for the workshop: Michael Koß and Radoslaw Zubek: Minority Rights and Majority Rule in European Legislatures
Parliaments are the key institutions in democracies since in our view their functions do not only include legislation and the control of the executive but also offer an arena to mediate conflict between the government and opposition and open up opportunities for consensus. Minority rights are thus important not only to enable the opposition to influence decision-making and to control the government but also to channel disagreement towards the floor where conflicts can be played out (even if not always solved). In our paper we argue that since its democratic re-establishment in 1990 the Hungarian Parliament has gradually lost its capacity to manage political conflict which results in poor political performance.
Two explanations are to be explored in the paper: first, the change of institutional setting and its consequences are mapped out as at the time of its naissance the Hungarian Parliament established firm barriers on majoritarian decision-making. Institutional factors include procedural rules as well as extra-parliamentary elements such as party competition and government type. We argue that the procedural changes aiming at strengthening governability along with the even more fierce party competition and the shift towards one-party government all contributed to the dominance of majority rules. While institutional factors can partly explain the decreasing role of Parliament the lack of major procedural change indicates the need to look beyond institutions. The second set of explanations thus aims at addressing how political actors, especially parties contributed to the devaluation of minority rights in the Hungarian Parliament. Based on a dataset of roll-call voting results, parliamentary questions and amendment techniques from different periods of the 1990-2010 parliamentary terms, we demonstrate the decreasing role of opposition and the decreasing consensus-orientation in the legislative process and the dominance of party-conflicts over policy-conflicts in the use of control tools. The paper also sheds light on the consequences such as the emergence of irregular opposition techniques (like obstruction through questions), the unpredictability of policies and finally the growing instability of the political system as a whole.
We expect that the case study will add to academic knowledge by way of pointing to the importance of contextual factors in parliamentary analysis and will contribute to the theoretical debate about the implications of majority rule in different parliamentary systems.
Gabriella Ilonszki Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University of Budapest
Péter Ondré is PhD student at the Corvinus University of Budapest
Réka Várnagy is assistant professor and Phd candidate at Corvinus Unversity of Budapest
