Attacking and Defending Democracy Behind its Façade: Legislatures at the Intersection of Autocratization and Democratic Resilience

Legislatures have long been viewed primarily as arenas through which executive aggrandizement is either enabled or constrained in processes of autocratization and democratization. This article advances a complementary perspective by examining whether the quality of parliamentary law-making itself can undermine democratic recovery and regime stability, even in the absence of explicitly aggrandizing legislation. Building on the concept of legislative backsliding, the study hypothesizes that systematically poor-quality law-making—marked by procedural misuse, legal instability, and constitutional irregularities—may weaken accountability mechanisms and erode the rule of law, thereby constraining prospects for democratization. Empirically, the article conducts a comparative analysis of parliamentary law-making in Bulgaria and North Macedonia, two cases characterized by long-term regime oscillations between autocratization and democratization. The comparison leverages variation in EU status—member state versus candidate country—and covers extended timeframes (2009–2024 for Bulgaria; 2006–2024 for North Macedonia), allowing the identification of stable patterns of legislative behavior across different parliamentary majorities, political crises, and reform cycles. The study assembles an original dataset capturing multiple dimensions of legislative quality as outlined by Sebők, Kiss, and Kovács (2023), focusing on legal stability, formal and constitutional compliance, and procedural choices. Particular attention is paid to laws regulating accountability mechanisms, including the judiciary, media, civil society, and electoral rules. Indicators include frequent amendments, constitutional review outcomes, and practices of procedural misuse such as urgent or shortened procedures, legislative riders, and parliamentary obstruction. Contextual variables—such as elections, protests, divided government, and EU conditionality—are incorporated to account for alternative explanations. In a second analytical step, the article assesses whether legislative backsliding destabilizes political regimes even when adopted laws are substantively neutral or de-aggrandizing. By combining expert validation with qualitative follow-up interviews, the study demonstrates how degraded law-making processes can generate legal uncertainty, weaken implementation, and indirectly facilitate autocratization. The findings contribute to comparative regime studies by highlighting legislatures not only as sites of contestation over executive power, but as autonomous sources of democratic erosion or resilience.