Managing courts in competitive authoritarian regimes: Co-optation, repression and resistance in Hungary

More than a decade of democratic backsliding has turned Hungary into a competitive authoritarian state. The government has initiated many judicial reforms to exert control over the judiciary, yet needed to maintain plausible deniability due to formal international and constitutional standards of judicial independence. Based on interviews with Hungarian judges and experts for the judicial system, we explore techniques of managing the courts. In particular we study mechanisms of co-optation and soft repression and explain why the resistance of judges was weak. We find that a complex web of informal patronal politics undermines judicial independence in practice. Moreover, the regime fosters competition between three clients who are entrusted to manage and control the judiciary: the heads of the Supreme Court (Kúria), the National Judicial Office, and the Constitutional Court. Their resources and power ebb and flow with their reliability and performance. We conclude that competitive authoritarian regimes can maintain formally independent judicial institutions by delegating and incentivizing control over the judiciary. They thereby escape measurement, maintain plausible deniability, and evade international pressure.