What the Rule of Law Is About. Narrating Its Foundations

This chapter presents the findings of our empirical study “Narrating the Rule of Law” concerning how the MPs and government representatives in Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia referred to the foundations of the rule of law. Based on our study of the hundreds of documents, we explore how politicians spoke about the purpose of the rule of law, its elements and sources of legitimacy. The term ‘rule of law’ was often used interchangeably with concepts such as ‘(national) constitution’, ‘constitutional state’ or ‘constitutionality’. We show that in their speeches, parliamentarians agreed on relevant aspects and that the mentions of these aspects followed a similar pattern (e.g., mostly opposition parties used them when criticising the government), although concrete narratives varied. The high proportion of overlapping narratives implies that party ideology only partially structured how parliamentarians spoke about the purpose, elements and legitimation of the rule of law. To substantiate our interpretations, we provide various illustrative quotes.