The Concept of Tailor-made Laws and Legislative Backsliding in Central-Eastern Europe

Kiss, Rebeka and Sebők, Miklós (2025) The Concept of Tailor-made Laws and Legislative Backsliding in Central-Eastern Europe. COMPARATIVE EUROPEAN POLITICS. ISSN 1472-4790

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Abstract

This article examines the concept of tailor-made laws and their empirical implications in the process of legislative backsliding. We define tailor-made laws as legislation that codifies an individual case under the guise of a general rule. These laws are designed directly or indirectly to affect only certain individuals or institutions, thereby potentially disadvantaging or favouring their target at the expense of the broader public interest. We argue that the normative assessment of these laws is partly dependent on the availability of judicial remedy for restoring the generality of the legal norm in question. By developing case studies from Central–Eastern Europe, we utilised this concept to better understand the characteristics of law-making in the shift from liberal to illiberal democracy. We show that the proliferation of tailor-made laws is a prime candidate for the empirical markers of legislative backsliding: besides public procurement, they may serve as key instruments for implementing discretionary reward and punishment policies.

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