Although over the last thirty years an increasing number of scientific articles and books with diverse approaches have been published on the practice of constitutional adjudication, several methodological problems still prevail. The main deficiency of the systematic empirical research on constitutional adjudication consist in an unsophisticated dichotomous approach that separates the merely positive and negative decisions of constitutional courts, i.e. decisions that concluded in declaring the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of a given legislative act. This approach has been deeply inconsistent with the worldwide practice of constitutional adjudication, since the latter shows a widespread differentiation of judicial decisions over the last thirty years. In this study, we have elaborated a more sophisticated methodology for systematically mapping the manifold reality of constitutional adjudication, and measuring the strength of judicial decisions. In order to fit the research to reality, we have elaborated a scale to measure the strength of judicial decisions. This scale seems to be an appropriate tool to answer the main descriptive research question of our project: to what extent have decisions of constitutional courts constrained the legislative's room for maneuver? The present methodological paper focuses on the problem how to measure the strength of judicial decisions vis-à-vis the legislation and shows, by means of the first results of a pilot project, how this new methodology might be applied.

This study analyses the election manifestos of Hungarian parties in campaigns between 1998 and 2006, for the purpose of assessing the significance and nature of EU-related promises. Three campaigns and government terms are studied: one prior to EU accession, a second around the time Hungary became a Member State and the third after joining the EU. The study follows the mandate view of representative government and the pledge approach for exploring election manifestos. Three main categories of EU-related pledges are discussed: firstly, pledges related to values associated with the European Union, secondly, pledges on adaptation to its institutions, policies, and norms, and finally pledges that promised availability and use of EU funds. The findings are that only a small proportion of election pledges was EU-related, and few were specific enough to test their later fulfilment by governments. We maintain that our results show how undisputed the issue of Hungarian membership was before 2010. But this lack of EU-related conflicts diminished the information content of manifestos regarding accession.

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While a large literature studies the various tools of autocratic survival, targeting opposition actors with austerity measures in electoral autocracies is hitherto understudied. This paper argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a rare opportunity for Hungary’s Fidesz party to disarm opposition parties via cutting off resources of municipalities led by opposition mayors and eliminating any remnants of local governments’ fiscal autonomy. Analysing original data from government decrees on local transfers, this study contributes to the existing literature by conceptualising fiscal strangulation as part of electoral authoritarian regimes’ toolbox to discredit opposition parties and their ability to govern locally.

In 1990, a decentralized local government system was introduced in Hungary. One of the main issues of the system was fragmentation at local level. This paper examines the attempts made by the central government to deal with this issue in the last thirty years. First, the study analyses the municipal splits and maps the dynamics, the reasons, and the environmental and political factors affecting these secessions. Second, it examines the government’s attempts at reform to reduce the effects of fragmentation.The paper argues that the Fidesz-KDNP electoral victory in 2010 was a milestone in the handling of territorial issues: municipal splits became virtually impossible with the new regulation of the secession process, and de facto territorial consolidation reform was carried out through alteration of the local electoral system and functional rescaling and merging of the mayors’ offices.