PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS AND THE LEGITIMACY OF LAWS IN HUNGARY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS AND THE LEGITIMACY OF LAWS IN HUNGARY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: The 2010 election in Hungary resulted in the victory of Fidesz, a conservative party which acquired a comfortable majority in the parliament and used it to initiate a number of important policy reforms. However, there are good reasons to think that both the way these reforms were adopted and their content violated a number of procedural fairness norms, such as participation in decision making and even some aspects of the rule of law. According to David Beetham, Tom Tyler and others, legitimacy is dependent on moral evaluations concerning the ruling power, and among those evaluations, perceptions of the procedural fairness being exercised by the authorities are of a crucial importance. If the theory holds, then the legitimacy of Fidesz’s rule would have eroded over the years, and indeed this is what happened, by 2012 trust in the government and in political institutions has dropped to the levels seen before the 2010 elections. But since economic problems have persisted, we cannot say whether this drop was caused by discontent with governmental performance or procedural fairness or both. Our research aims at investigating the role of procedural fairness in the formation of legitimacy beliefs. Our preliminary analysis suggest that moral evaluations and, more particularly, procedural fairness expectations do have an effect on people’s legitimacy believes in the Hungarian context as well.

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