This chapter analyzes legislative engineering and administrative restructuring as core arenas in which competing informal institutions were embedded during the autocratization of Hungary and Macedonia. These processes enabled incumbents to entrench authority while maintaining the outward forms of parliamentary democracy, producing sustained institutional asymmetry. In Hungary, the Fidesz-led government after 2010 used its parliamentary supermajority to adopt a new constitution, enact cardinal laws that locked in partisan advantages, recalibrate the electoral system in its favor, weaken oversight institutions, and centralize administrative control under loyal appointees. In Macedonia, the VMRO-DPMNE–DUI coalition pursued a more incremental strategy, using legislative amendments and regulatory changes to politicize public administration, extend executive influence over independent agencies, and blur the separation between party and state. In both countries, these measures reshaped the rules of political competition, especially in media regulation and institutional appointments, creating structural advantages that marginalized opposition and weakened horizontal accountability. The analysis demonstrates that parliamentary authority can be deployed not to enhance democratic governance but to systematically erode it from within.