Politically triggered de-institutionalisation of parliament and the measurement of parliament powers

Abstract

A recurring thesis of legislative research is the ‘decline of parliaments’ that originates from Bryce (1921) and develops the idea that governments dominate the parliamentary arena. The Hungarian case has fit well in this stream (Ilonszki, 2007; Zubek, 2011) with the strengthening of the power of the executive. Recently, however this trend seems to carry more weight in the transformed Hungarian political landscape, the loss of the democratic parliamentary capacities contributes to the deterioration of democracy itself. The decline of parliament has been interpreted as part of the de-democratization process (Szymanski, 2018). In our paper we would like to contribute to this approach by mapping the process of the decline. We argue that the current trends and events go beyond the decline thesis and can be interpreted as a process of de-institutionalisation that is indeed an inherent part of the de-democratization process itself. (...)