Paper short abstract:

This research focuses on the contested and unequal relationship between private bailiffs and poor rural households in Northern Hungary. We look at bailiffs as street-level bureaucrats and uncover their formal and informal practises and the ways households bureaucratically contest their debts.

Paper long abstract:

Creditor-debtor relationships are understood as either universal moral relationship (Graeber, 2011), or as particular and contextually embedded in specific legal environments and practices (Riles, 2011; Gregory, 2012). We look at the organisational and institutional context of debt by applying the street-level bureaucracy framework to the legal-financial field (Ortiz, 2021), and specifically examining the practices and their contestations of contracted-out bailiffs as part of the state bureaucracy in Hungary. Bailiffs are are semi-autonomous state-appointed legal professionals acting as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), and actually administer and enforce debt payments through coercive deduction from debtors' savings account, wage garnishments and/or the auctioning of movables or immovables. The formal operation of bailiffs is organised and prescribed by the procedural 1994 Laws of Debt Enforcement, yet their actual operations are based on informal practices and their own morals and logic common to the interpretive agency of SLBs (Bierschenk and Sardan, 2019). The tension between the formal and the informal has resulted in nationwide scandals and an unequal but contested relationship with debtors. Our research focuses on micro-contestations of poor household debtors in rural Northern Hungary by analysing official documents, interviewing debtors and bailiffs, and accompanying debtors to bailiffs' customer service bureaus, which are the primary sites for such contestations. Debtors encounter bailiffs - or rather their assistants - to contest their debts and such encounters can be treated as "meetings" (Brown et al, 2017), which allow debtors to negotiate and question the debts, the amounts, and the legality and fairness of debt enforcement.