Autocratic Legalism Kim Lane Scheppele Upd May 2026

Autocrats change the fundamental rules of the game to ensure they cannot lose.

Scheppele’s theory is not abstract. It emerged from watching Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary after its 2010 supermajority. Hungary became the lab, and the experiment was terrifyingly efficient.

Between 2010 and 2014, Orbán’s government enacted a new constitution (the Fundamental Law), reduced the Constitutional Court’s jurisdiction over fiscal matters, slashed the retirement age for judges from 70 to 62 (dismissing nearly 300 judges at once), installed a pro-government media council, and rewrote election rules to entrench the majority. Every step was legally taken. No tanks rolled. Yet by 2014, Hungary was no longer a liberal democracy. autocratic legalism kim lane scheppele upd

Scheppele’s close reading of the Hungarian case, published in Constitutional Democracy and the Rule of Law (2015), broke new ground. She showed that autocratic legalism proceeds in stages:

Crucially, each stage is defended as legal. When the European Union invoked Article 7 proceedings against Hungary, Orbán’s government replied with hundreds of pages of legal argument. They had changed the law lawfully, they insisted. The fact that the law was designed to prevent future alternation in power was, in their view, a political question, not a legal one. Autocrats change the fundamental rules of the game

Scheppele’s diagnosis forced a painful realization: The EU’s famous “Copenhagen criteria” (requiring new members to have stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and rule of law) had no enforcement mechanism once a member backslid legally. The union had weapons against naked coups, but none against constitutions rewritten by majority vote.

In her 2025 testimony to the German Bundestag, Scheppele offered new counter-strategies: Crucially, each stage is defended as legal

Scheppele developed this concept primarily to analyze the post-2010 trajectories of:

She has also noted parallels in other contexts, such as Turkey (Erdoğan) , Venezuela (Maduro) , and increasingly Israel (judicial overhaul proposals) and India (use of constitutional amendments and regulatory power).