Electoral Rules, Legitimacy, and the Exercise of Supermajoritatian Powers: Evidence from Survey Experiments Around the 2014 Hungarian Elections

Coalitions of sufficient size often have the ability to use their transitory majorities to alter the electoral rules in ways expected to benefit the incumbent.  How such changes are perceived by voters is not well understood.   Since the collapse of Communism in 1990, Hungarian governments have been standard majorities.  In 2010 the Hungarian center-Right party Fidesz was the beneficiary of a perfect political storm, managing to win control of a supermajority sufficient to alter the Hungarian constitution.  Fidesz proceeded to implement several controversial but highly technical revisions to the Hungarian electoral rules from which they expected to benefit. We fielded a panel survey immediately before and after the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary elections, the first under the new rules.  We ask respondents to evaluate the fairness and legitimacy of the elections after receiving randomly assigned messages describing the electoral changes.   After the election we then provide respondents with differing levels of information about what the outcome would have been under the old rules compared to what actually happened.  We report both across- and within-subject effects of this information on the perceived fairness and legitimacy of the elections.  We investigate the possibility of heterogenous treatment effects based on (a) the respondents pre-election ideological position, (b) education, and (c) self-described political efficacy.  We also report results from a separate, pre-electoral survey experiment where we describe different actions to which Fidesz has exercised its supermajority and then ask respondents to evaluate the desirability of supermajority powers.