Procedural fairness and the legitimacy of laws in Hungary: An empirical analysis

Abstract

In the 2010 general elections in Hungary, the socialist-liberal government was ousted and Fidesz, a conservative party, secured a constitutional (two-third) majority in the Parliament. Using its comfortable majority, Fidesz started a series of large-scale institutional reforms, including the adoption of a new constitution. Several policy and institutional areas were also fundamentally reformed, such as the system of social benefits, the rules and institutions of local governance, the educational system, the media authority, and the electoral system -just to name a few.However, the legitimacy of these hasty reforms is far from being obvious. The paper follows the approach of Tom Tyler and others who argue that perceptions of procedural fairness are crucial in the formation of legitimacy beliefs. Tyler also argues that people do not obey the law and assist in implementing policies because they fear the sanctions or hope for rewards. Rather, they put trust in these mechanisms and institutions, because people think that they are legitimate. That is, legitimacy spurs law-abiding behaviour and makes policy implementation easier, which is a requirement for effective policy making.Our assumption is that the way reforms have been adopted in Hungary has violated a number of basic procedural fairness norms, like those of voice and participation. We also assume that Hungarians are just as sensitive to procedural fairness as Americans or Western Europeans are. Therefore, we would expect discontent among the Hungarian population in terms of procedural fairness, and, as a consequence, falling trust in, and legitimacy of, state policies and institutions. Survey data seems to confirm our hypotheses. Through our own survey research, we demonstrate that the perception of procedural unfairness is related to uncooperative attitudes towards policies and institutions, which decrease their effectiveness. The paper, therefore, aims at establishing 1 The paper is partly based on research founded under the FP7 research project "FIDUCIA -New European Crimes and Trust-based Policy".

Party Support, Values, and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity

“…This is underlined by findings in Tyler () and Levi, Sacks, and Taylor (), who link procedural fairness and political legitimacy in other institutional contexts, too. Gangl () and Boda and Medve‐Bálint () show that procedural fairness in fact outweighs government's performance when it comes to determining institutional legitimacy. Increasing levels of perceived electoral integrity and reducing the gap between electoral winners and losers is hence paramount, and by linking perceptions of electoral integrity in a cognitive‐motivational model to prior attitudes and information‐processing strategies, this article suggests that reduced polarization in the election campaign together with an increased transparency of the electoral process could help achieve this.…”