The constitutional legitimation of authoritarian regimes : a comparative analysis of apartheid South Africa and communist Hungary

Abstract

This paper studies the use of constitutional legitimation strategies in authoritarian regimes. The introduction analyses constitutional democracy through David Beetham’s concept of legitimate authority. Beetham considers that an authority is legitimate if three conditions are gathered: the existence of a written rule, a spread feeling of fairness and the explicit consent to the creation of legitimate authority. I argue that a transposition in the field of constitutional democracy gives rise to the concept of constitutional legitimation – namely the use of constitutional instruments to support the existence of a democratic fiction in a given society. Conceptually, I argue that constitutional legitimation strategies can be equally used by authoritarian regimes to compensate the lack of legitimacy of their policies. The following sections are dedicated to the case studies of apartheid South Africa and communist Hungary. The two authoritarian systems differed in almost everything, but they seemed to give an equal importance to constitutional legitimation. The comparative work focuses on three aspects. Section two studies how the constitutional design of the two authoritarian constitutions ensured a control of the electoral outcome. Section three focuses on how a specific constitutional design gave the authoritarian rulers a total control on the political institutions. It challenges the notion that authoritarian constitutions are barely more than shame constitutions. Section four looks at constitutional legitimation and the creation of channel of subordination. More precisely, it looks at the role of the judiciary (South Africa) and social organizations (Hungary) in the legitimation of the authoritarian policies.