Authors

András Bozóki¹; Zoltán Fleck²;  ¹ Central European University, Austria;  ² Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary

Discussion

While the growing literature of de-democratization and autocratization can be characterized by its conceptual richness and innovative ideas, scholars often focus on the political level of regime change omitting the discussion of social conditions. However, when studying the decline of democracy, one needs to go beyond the institutional approaches of political science, and it is more useful to consider the social and cultural dimensions as well. Political changes, sometimes quick as they are, need to be contextualized to understand their depth and estimate their longevity. Methodologically, one needs to acknowledge that these changes are almost always interactions between political elites and the society, and leaders can only do what social conditions allow them. Looking the destruction of Hungarian democracy from this point of view, it was not only Orbán who unilaterally changed the political regime; it was also the willingness of the recipients to accept new rules and even new norms for the transformation of political order. The social conditions for autocratization included historical cleavages, traditional, non-democratic and illiberal political culture just as the acceptance of extreme polarization as normality. These factors made autocratization more inclusive: it was not simply forced on the society top-down, but the society passively approved the regime. By doing so it helped the leader in re-embedding autocracy twenty years after the fall of communist rule.