Civil Society and Court-Curbing: Explaining the Dynamics of Mobilization

Attacks on courts have become a defining feature of contemporary democratic backsliding. While in the past decade, the literature has extensively documented and mapped how executives with illiberal aspirations pursue strikingly similar court-curbing strategies, comparatively little attention has been paid to systematically analyzing societal reactions to these incursions. Moreover, existing studies often conceptualize levels of societal mobilization against court-curbing as discrete outcomes – typically reduced to “success” or “failure” – without offering a systematic framework for understanding how it emerges, evolves and varies across contexts. Addressing these gaps, in this paper we ask why comparable assaults on judicial independence provoke mass resistance in some cases but elicit limited or short-lived reactions in others. To this aim, we provide the comparative analysis of Hungary, Poland and Israel. We examine the political conditions under which court-curbing occurred, the configuration and functioning of the civic sphere in each case and the range of mobilization strategies deployed – from discursive reframing and cross-sectoral coalition-building to legal and hybrid repertoires of action. Based on this analysis, we propose a comparative framework conceptualizing CSOs mobilization capacity against judicial backsliding as an outcome of the interaction among three dimensions: contextual conditions, organizational structures and procedural strategies.