This thesis examines why the European Union has been unable to effectively enforce democratic norms in Hungary under the regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (2014–2025) despite its commitment to the rule of law and the existence of enforcement mechanisms. This reveals an enforcement gap between normative commitments and operational capacity.

It engages with two competing theories: Liberal Intergovernmentalism, which explains the gap as a structural outcome of sovereignty-preserving institutional design shaped through intergovernmental bargaining that constrains enforcement and enables institutional exploitation by the Hungarian government, and Normative Constructivism, which attributes the gap to norm contestation and normative incoherence, producing interpretive ambiguity, divergent understandings of the rule of law, and inconsistent enforcement practices.

Employing a qualitative, deductive, directed content analysis of primary institutional documents, the study applies predefined coding categories and evaluative criteria to comparatively assess both theories. It concludes that Liberal Intergovernmentalism provides the more convincing explanation of the enforcement gap, as it directly links institutional design features to structurally constrained and ineffective enforcement, while Normative Constructivism captures secondary interpretive dynamics of the rule of law.