(Dis)empowerment and Constitutional Court Resilience: A Conceptual Framework and Explorative Evidence from the Slovak Constitutional Court

This article conceptualizes constitutional court (dis)empowerment as a process impacting constitutional court resilience. It introduces a two-dimensional typology of mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous empowerment and dis-empowerment that points to the centrality of agency to an extent independent from formal competences of the constitutional court. Subsequently, the article applies the mechanisms to the case of the Slovak Constitutional Court. This formally powerful institution operates in an illiberalizing environment and faces the challenge of how to resist de-democratization. Therefore, its study yields lessons for constitutional court resilience amidst de-democratization. Via a combination of research methods (contextual analysis and insights from semi-structured interviews), the article emphasizes endogenous disempowerment as a key, albeit least studied mechanism. The findings highlight self-imposed limits by the Slovak Constitutional Court that can complicate its capacity to resist post-2023 de-democratization in Slovakia and point to the risks for resilience embedded in endogenous judicial disempowerment.