Kim Scheppele

During her fellowship at the IWM, Kim Scheppele will finish her book Destroying Democracy by Law, which examines how a new generation of autocrats around the world has consolidated power by law. Instead of focusing on populist rhetoric, Scheppele’s book concentrates instead on the means by which these charismatic leaders change the legal rules to ensure political power cannot change hands, making it impossible to change the system from within. Additionally, Scheppele is working on another book, Hungary’s Constitutional Transformations: From Communism through Liberalism to Autocracy, coauthored by Gábor Halmai, which zooms in on one country, Hungary, and compares the 1989 constitutional revolution with the new constitutional order that replaced it in 2011–2012. This book shows both how the ideological foundations of the state changed and how the same legal rules that cleared the way for democratic change in 1989 put paid to that possibility after 2012.