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The concept and measurement of legislative backsliding – The case of Hungary

Democracy
Parliaments
Public Policy
Regulation
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Qualitative
Decision Making
Political Regime
Rebeka Kiss
Centre for Social Sciences
Rebeka Kiss
Centre for Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of legislative backsliding defined from the perspective of liberal democracy as the deterioration in the quality of the legislative process and the laws. By examining the four dimensions of legislative backsliding – the (1) public policy, the (2) legal- constitutional-formal, (3) the procedural, and the (4) stability dimension – for the first time, we develop an index that can be used to analyse the practice of legislative backsliding. We use qualitative case studies to test this system for Hungary to gain new perspectives on an emerging phenomenon, hybrid political systems. We scrutinise laws that feature the most serious flaws to illustrate the viability of our theoretical approach. We find that often times laws which show qualitative deficiencies exhibit them in not just, but several dimensions. The index developed in our study is well-positioned for longitudinal and comparative analysis as the measurement system for legislative backsliding is scalable to most advanced democracies.