Kálmán Pócza, senior research fellow at the Research Institute for Politics and Government, presented at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston.
Co-authored with Pep Vallbé, Gábor Dobos, and Attila Gyulai, the research analyzes over 25,000 constitutional court rulings across 19 European countries to examine why certain constitutional courts frequently annul contested laws while others exercise restraint. The presentation highlighted that judicial assertiveness cannot be explained in isolation by legal-institutional rules alone, nor solely by the political environment. Instead, annulment practice emerges from the strategic interaction between these two factors: institutional design and the prevailing balance of political power. Consequently, the findings caution against context-insensitive, "one-size-fits-all" institutional reforms in constitutional adjudication.
The research abstract is available on the official APSA website here.