Do constitutional courts restrict government policy? The effects of budgetary implications and bloc-politics in the Hungarian Constitutional Court's decisions between 1990 and 2018

ABSTRACT

The article addresses the budgetary implications of constitutional adjudication by analysing the decisions of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (HCC) between 1990 and 2018. Our results highlight that the HCC does not narrow the parliamentary majority's room to manoeuvre by blocking policies with serious budgetary consequences, and the potential budgetary consequences of a decision do not weigh in with the judicial output. At the same time, right-leaning courts are more likely to declare a law unconstitutional passed by a left-wing parliamentary majority, whereas left-wing courts adjudicate unconstitutionality with about roughly the same likelihood in cases of right- and left-leaning parliaments.

KEYWORDS:

• Constitutional courts
• policy-making
• judicial behaviour
• Hungarian constitutional court
• national budget

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Judicial Constraints on Legislatures in Europe 1990–2020 (JUDICON-EU): https://judiconeu.uni-nke.hu/

2 Most recently, several initiatives have been launched which indicate that the field of empirical legal studies is getting more and more popular, even in Europe. The first and the second Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe held in Amsterdam (2016) and in Leuven (2018), as well as the activity of Law and Court Standing Group of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) along with several research projects at various European Universities like JUSTIN (Masaryk University, University Brno), ICOURTS (University of Copenhagen) or PLURICOURTS (University of Oslo) are excellent examples which demonstrate that various methods of empirical legal studies are nowadays more widespread in the European research community than a few years ago.

3 Before 2010, judges were elected for 9 years.

4 https://www.comparativeagendas.net/pages/master-codebook

5 For this exercise, all other variables were fixed at their mean values.

6 We find similar results if we take the year 2013 as threshold instead of 2010 (B = 0.05, SE = 0.41, p = 0.91)

7 Again, the selection of the year 2013 as threshold does not change results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kálmán Pócza

Kálmán Pócza is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Public Service (Research Institute for Politics and Government) and Head of the Center for Constitutional Politics at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He is the Principal Investigator of the JUDICON-EU project. His research focuses on constitutional politics, judicial-legislative relations and constitutionalism. Most recent publications include Constitutional Politics and the Judiciary: Decision-making in Central and Eastern Europe (London/New York: Routledge, 2019, editor); How to Measure the Strength of Judicial Decisions: A Methodological Framework, in: German Law Journal 18(2017):6 (together with Gábor Dobos and Attila Gyulai).

Zsófia Papp

Zsófia Papp is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. She publishes on legislative behaviour, campaign personalization, electoral accountability and democratic satisfaction. Her work is published, among others, in Parliamentary Affairs, Political Geography, European Union Politics, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Acta Politica and Political Studies Review. She is currently serving as Associate Editor at Political Research Exchange, an Open Access journal of ECPR and Taylor & Francis.

Gábor Dobos

Gábor Dobos is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and at the National University of Public Service in Budapest. He is primarily interested in local politics and constitutional adjudication. His latest publications include the chapter “Hungary: The Expansion and the Limits of National Politics at the Local Level” in Gendźwiłł, A. – Kjaer, U. – Steyvers, K. (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe (Routledge, 2022). Gábor Dobos is the secretary general of the Hungarian Political Science Association.

Attila Gyulai

Attila Gyulai is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest and Associate Professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest. His research focuses on realist political theory, democratic theory and the Hungarian political system. He published a co-authored monograph with Routledge and journal articles in Theoria, Griffith Law Review, and German Law Journal.