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Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ‘organized over-world’, the ‘state employing mafia methods’ and the ’adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework.The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.

This article presents a novel argument about what enables democracies to survive when executives attempt to weaken institutional constraints. We argue that democracies erode because (1) an illiberal executive attempts to undermine democracy and (2) this executive commands a majority in the national legislature. Democracies survive if the executive is not deeply illiberal or if the opposition controls a majority of the national legislature. The empirical section presents data about executive illiberalism and the balance of power in the national legislature for thirteen Latin American presidents. We test our argument in four negative cases (episodes) in Argentina since 1983. We use primary sources including 125 original interviews to explain how two presidents who attempted to centralize power fell short of eroding democracy

A century after the Communist Party was formed in Czechoslovakia, it still exists, as a survivor of several crises. After 1989, it has been seen as a relic of the former Communist regime as it was supposed to disappear quickly, but this did not happen during the first thirty years of post-Communist evolution. Even if we should have already witnessed the weakening of the basis of the party, it was only during the 2021 General Elections that it became unable to enter the Parliament. After this turning point, it apparently moved towards a more nationalistic stance, turning “brown,” focusing more on illiberal and nationalist rhetorics. This situation became obvious in the frame of the Communists-led Stačilo! (Enough!) coalition for the European elections in 2024. I propose an analysis balancing two possible explanations, on the one side the observation of a new orientation explained by the current electoral crisis masking a hidden identity deeply rooted in the history (a party change in the Gauja 2016 sense).

Like much of the rest of the world, East Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) has recently experienced a democratic “fall” in which several electoral democracies have undergone autocratization. This synchronized with China’s rise through what can be called illiberal realignment as autocratizing regimes in the region have sought increasing material and ideological support from Beijing in the face of Western human rights criticism and occasional (although usually only the threat of ) sanctions. China has viewed this regress as a rejection of “Western-style democracy.” Yet a democratic “spring” which preceded the fall left a legacy of democratic normativity in the region as backsliding regimes continued to seek legitimacy through (however unfair and unfree) elections and (partial) liberalization. Residual democratic normativity combined with geopolitical insecurities have limited the region’s illiberal realignment toward China during this democratic fall.

Existing research on the contestation of the liberal order predominantly focuses on the corrosive effects of exogenous spoilers or the peculiarities of anti-liberal politics in domestic contexts. Yet, we know little about how the internal evolution of orders affects their long-term viability. As a first step towards developing an endogenous theory of international order transformation, this article draws inspiration from norm translation theory and develops the concept of the consolidation dilemma as a trade-off between rigidity and resilience in the evolution of international normative orders. This article argues that the process of order consolidation can paradoxically result in the decline of its overall resilience by undermining the constructive ambiguity needed to maintain a broader appeal. Applying this framework to the illustrative cases of Poland and Hungary, the article shows that challenges to the European liberal order did not materialise in the 1990s because its potential resisters were included within the thin liberal order of the time. Over time, however, Europe’s liberal order underwent an endogenous transformation from a thin to a thick order with more clarity, institutionalisation, and value enforcement. This internal transformation narrowed down its support base and compromised its overall resilience to withstand endogenous and exogenous shocks.

This book forum discusses Ivan Kalmar´s pivotal book on the position of “Central Europe” in the racialized hierarchies of “West”/“Europe” and their not-quite-white Others. The authors debate the main contributions and potential blind spots of the book and its key concepts. The concepts of racism and whiteness answer the not-so-new question on Central Europe and Europe's “East” anew: How come that the populations of and in this diverse region happen to repeatedly find themselves in the very same marginal position in European historical orders? This question has very contemporary manifestations; Europe's persistent East-West socio-economic and socio-cultural hierarchies, among others, co-produce the local populations' marginalized or marginalizing positioning vis-à-vis each other and the rest of Europe or the world. In this honest discussion, the authors chart new intellectual pathways for utilizing racism and whiteness to help us better understand this question and its many manifestations from within and outside the region.

For over a decade, populists have been experimenting with a new political regime–illiberal democracy. Vocal proponents, such as Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán, develop “democratic illiberalism” as an ideational model for the illiberal‐democratic regime they are building. Exploiting the normative appeal of popular sovereignty as the master legitimating frame for political authority in our age, illiberals in power try to subvert liberal democracies from within. Using their democratic mandate, they erode liberal norms and coopt liberal institutions to serve illiberal purposes. The dangers of illiberal democracy prompted many democracy scholars to deny democratic character to illiberal regimes. The concept “illiberal democracy,” they argue, is not useful analytically and is incoherent. Following a critical analysis of the debates surrounding the concept of illiberal democracy, I advance three arguments in support of the conceptual viability of this regime type. The first is a conceptual argument: While there are normatively attractive conceptions of democracy, on which democracy cannot be illiberal, the democratic model currently practiced in “real existing democracies” leaves conceptual space for illiberal forms of democratic regimes. Substantiating my position against scoring definitional victories on illiberal democracy, I advance a second, political argument: Liberals risk losing the long‐term political battle for liberal democracy, as they may be portrayed as anti‐pluralist anti‐democrats, intent on excluding from the democratic arena their illiberal opponents. My third and final point is a normative argument: The central debate concerning illiberal democracy should focus on the normative appeal of its foundational ideas—the core ideational features of the competing political regimes. Political theorists can greatly contribute here by providing a clear understanding of the main ideological competitors—what they are and what makes them attractive to many—and such is precluded by purely conceptual arguments against illiberal democracy.

Liberal democracy is facing renewed challenges from a growing group of states undergoing democratic backsliding. While entrenched autocrats have long resented and contested the established liberal order, we know far less about how newer backsliding states behave on the international stage. We argue these states, who joined prominent western liberal institutions prior to their backsliding, will use their established membership in these organizations both to protect themselves from future scrutiny regarding adherence to liberal democratic values and to oppose the prevailing western liberal norms that increasingly conflict with their evolving interests. Using voting data from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 2006-2021, we show that backsliding states are more likely to vote against targeted resolutions that name and shame specific countries. We supplement this analysis with detailed data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and combine regression analysis and a structural topic model (STM) to show that backsliding states are more critical in their UPR reports when evaluating advanced western democracies, and more likely to emphasize issues that align with their own interests while de-emphasizing ones that might threaten government power and control over citizens.

While interest in illiberalism has increased in recent years, the study of the connections between anti-gender discourse and transnational dissemination is a more recent scholarly endeavour. Emerging feminist scholarship has helped to move beyond national cases of illiberalism to understand how the gendered nature of illiberalism is revealed through its ability to cross borders and, in recent years, to become a movement with a transnational character. This article examines the evolution of the political discourse on gender in Romania and proposes a three-stage framework leading from gender traditionalism to a more pronounced illiberal discourse. The article examines whether the recent rise of the political party Alliance for the Union of Romanians (Alianța pentru Unirea României, AUR) represents a new step towards an established political illiberal discourse in Romania. The official public addresses of AUR are analysed to show how the terminology and themes identified as cornerstones of illiberalism (e.g., anti-gender, traditional family, opposition to reproductive rights, education, and anti-LGBTQ) are incorporated into its rhetoric.

Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.