Etienne Hanelt and Attila Vincze,“Managing Courts In Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: Co-Optation, Repression And Resistance In Hungary.” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft (2025): 1-20.
Summary: This chapter investigates how attorneys, particularly judges, navigate judicial backsliding in Hungary’s competitive authoritarian regime. Despite formal guarantees of judicial independence, the government has implemented strategic reforms to control the judiciary while maintaining an appearance of legitimacy internationally. Through interviews with Hungarian judges and judicial experts, the study reveals how informal patronage networks, co-optation, and soft repression techniques weaken judicial resistance and independence in practice. Power is decentralized among key judicial actors—the heads of the Supreme Court (Kúria), National Judicial Office, and Constitutional Court—who compete and cooperate to enforce regime control in exchange for political loyalty. This complex system enables the regime to sustain a façade of judicial autonomy while effectively undermining rule of law protections. The chapter underscores the constrained role of legal professionals under authoritarian pressure and illustrates how attorneys can be both enforcers and victims within managed judicial systems in backsliding democracies.