The Concept and Measurement of Legislative Backsliding

Abstract

The article examines the concept of legislative backsliding and offers a measurement strategy for its empirical analysis. Legislative backsliding is defined as a move away from liberal democracy in four critical dimensions of legislative quality, its public policy, legal-constitutional-formal, procedural, and stability aspects. We operationalise each of these dimensions with their separate indices relying on components such as stakeholder consultations, time passed between bill introduction and passing the law as well as results of constitutional reviews. We use qualitative mini case studies from Hungary, widely considered from 2010 on to be a poster child for democratic backsliding, to illustrate the viability of the proposed measurement strategy. We find that laws which show deficiencies in terms of legislative quality exhibit them in not just but several dimensions. Based on the case studies we offer insights into scaling up the law-level analysis to the level of legislative cycles and show how the legislative quality index can be used to measure macro-level legislative backsliding.