Attitudinal and strategic models prevail in studying the capacities of centralized constitutional courts (CCs) to withstand autocratization. Yet, these models rarely scrutinize CCs’ interpretations of political concepts. This article aims to remedy the gap via an institutionalist approach to the significance of conceptualizations of democracy by CCs. It invokes a maximalist reading of democracy to accommodate a wide range of conceptions, is diachronic, squarable with comparative case studies and sensitive to political regime types, using an ideal-typical distinction between semi-authoritarian, illiberal and democratic regimes. The article illustrates the potential of this approach by presenting a dataset on CCs in Hungary and Slovakia. Both regimes have formally powerful CCs with a non-democratic experience. Yet, they seem to have taken a different trajectory since 2010. The article suggests that analysing these two CCs’ conceptions of democracy can advance our understanding of their role in preventing (or failing to prevent) autocratization in Hungary and Slovakia.