Understanding the reservoirs of Constitutional Court resilience

Attitudinal and strategic models prevail in studying the capacities of centralized constitutional courts (CCs) to withstand autocratization. Yet, they rarely scrutinize CCs’ interpretations of political concepts. This paper aims to remedy the gap via an institutional perspective on the significance of conceptualizations of democracy by CCs. It invokes a maximalist reading of democracy to accommodate a wide range of conceptions, is diachronic, squarable with comparative case studies and sensitive to political regime types, using an ideal-typical distinction between semi-authoritarian, illiberal and democratic regimes. The paper illustrates the potential of this approach by presenting a dataset on Hungary and Slovakia. Both regimes have formally powerful CCs with a non-democratic experience. Yet, they seem to have taken a different trajectory after 2010. The paper suggests that analysing these two CCs’ conceptions of democracy can advance our understanding of their role in preventing, or failing to prevent, autocratization in Hungary and Slovakia.