The rule of law, legal consciousness and compliance

The status of the rule of law (hereafter RoL) has been steadily deteriorating in Hungary. This has come about via a number of minor steps that demonstrate a clear downward trend.1 The individual steps have been documented in detail not only in the legal literature (e.g. Jakab, 2011; Sonnevend et al., 2015), but also in the international press dealing with Hungary. However, the extent of the deterioration has often been unclear, with even experts sometimes disagreeing.2 This is due to a number of factors, the most important probably being that experts in the field are normally lawyers, who are usually untrained in quantitative methods. Traditional (qualitative) lawyerly methods are generally a reliable means of establishing whether a certain measure is in breach of the RoL. However, lawyers are not familiar with gauging the extent to which the RoL has deteriorated in a country. Another epistemological problem is that lawyers normally concentrate on the analysis of formal legal rules. But the nub of the problem in Hungary is precisely that the formal legal rules and the reality are increasingly growing apart, with changes taking place much more frequently in actual practices than in the formal legal rules (Jakab and Gajduschek, 2016). Such a situation may be comprehensively summed up by so-called ‘RoL indices’ that capture various details in a single indicator; more importantly, these give due consideration to actual practice.3 Such indices clearly reflect the erosion of the RoL in Hungary that has taken place in recent years and that (we have every reason to believe) will continue. In this chapter, we briefly present the values of two indices: (a) the RoL sub-index of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index and (b) the World Justice Project’s RoL Index. Within the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the so-called ‘status index’ is the average of the democracy index (which includes an RoL sub-index) and the market economy index. Figure 1 clearly shows a gradual erosion of the RoL in Hungary. The management index, meanwhile, reflects the efficiency of government. It also shows a downward trend – that is, the erosion of the RoL has not boosted efficiency.