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The Challenge of Institutionalisation: Post-Communist ‘Transitions’, Populism, and the Rule of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

Abstract

Institutionalisation – Populism – Rule of law – Poland – Hungary – Post-communist reformers more given to emulation, adoption and installation, than institutionalisation – Institutionalised traditions as resources and sources of recalcitrance – New populists as institutionalisers of anti-rule of law values, de-institutionalisers of independent institutions – ‘Abusive constitutionalists’, who erode and subvert the kinds of institutionalisation necessary to temper power

Type
Articles
Copyright
© 2019 The Authors 

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Footnotes

*

Gordon Samuels Professor of Law and Social Theory, University of New South Wales; Honorary Professor RegNet, ANU. This article has endured many iterations. Earlier versions were presented at a conference on How to Resolve the Crisis of Constitutional Democracy in Central Europe? 9-10 December 2016, Graduate School of Government and European Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia; to a workshop on Constitutionalism in Popular Democracy. Constitutional Techniques in the Early Days of Populist Rule and Refurbished National Sovereignty, 26 May, Central European University, Budapest, and to the XXVII World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Lisbon, Portugal 17-21 June 2017, as a signature lecture to the Transnational Legal Institute, King’s College, London, 17 November 2017, to a conference on ‘disenchantments with democracy’, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Geneva, 7-9 December 2017; and a workshop on New constitutionalism? New forms of democracy and rule of law beyond liberalism, Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, 12-13 July 2018. I am grateful to participants for their comments. I am also grateful for the thoughtful comments Eva Pils and Bojan Bugarič sent me, and to the three anonymous reviewers. The article was finally revised when I was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, March–July 2019.

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64 This is a central theme of Cheesman’s, Nick Opposing the Rule of Law. How Myanmar’s Courts make Law and Order (Cambridge University Press 2012)Google Scholar. See symposium on this book in 9(1) Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (2017).

65 I am indebted to Karol Muszynski, both for access to such materials and to his unpublished paper, ‘Socjologia prawa a kryzys konstytucyjny w Polsce. Między „imposybilistycznymi” rządami prawa a „silnym” systemem politycznym’ (copy on file with the author).

66 ‘Czy Polska jest państwem prawa?’ Wykład na Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim Presje Teka XXIV Klubu Jagiellońskiego (2011) pp. 223-224.

67 Supra n. 67.

68 Supra n. 67, p. 227.

69 PiS Program 2011 r. Nowoczesna, Solidarna, Bezpieczna Polska, Warsaw 2011, 17, quoted in Muszynski, ‘Socjologia prawa a kryzys konstytucyjny w Polsce’, 5.

70 Supra n. 67, p. 227.

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