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East European Politics
ISSN: 2159-9165 (Print) 2159-9173 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjcs21
Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central
and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and
Poland
Licia Cianetti, James Dawson & Seán Hanley
To cite this article: Licia Cianetti, James Dawson & Seán Hanley (2018) Rethinking “democratic
backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland, East European
Politics, 34:3, 243-256, DOI: 10.1080/21599165.2018.1491401
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2018.1491401
Published online: 18 Jul 2018.
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Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern
Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland
Licia Cianettia
, James Dawsonb
and Seán Hanley c
a
Department of Politics and International Relations, Centre of International Public Policy, Royal Holloway
University of London, London, UK; b
Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London, UK; c
School
of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, London, UK
ABSTRACT
This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of East
European Politics on “Rethinking democratic backsliding in Central
and Eastern Europe”, which seeks to expand the study of
democratic regression in CEE beyond the paradigmatic cases of
Hungary and Poland. Reviewing these contributions, we identify
several directions for research: 1) the need to critique “democratic
backsliding”, not simply as a label, but also as an assumed
regional trend; 2) a need to better integrate the role of illiberal
socio-economic structures such as oligarchical structures or
corrupt networks; and 3) a need to (re-)examine the trade-offs
between democratic stability and democratic quality. We also
note how insights developed researching post-communist regions
such as Western Balkans or the post-Soviet space could usefully
inform work on CEE backsliding. We conclude by calling for the
study of CEE democracy to become more genuinely interdisciplinary,
moving beyond some narrowly institutionalist comparative political
science assumptions.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 16 June 2018
Accepted 17 June 2018
KEYWORDS
Democracy; democratisation;
backsliding; Eastern Europe;
authoritarianism
Over the past decade, a scholarly consensus has emerged that that democracy in Central
and Eastern Europe (CEE) is deteriorating (Kochenov 2008; Sedelmeier 2014), a trend often
subsumed under the label “backsliding”.1
However, this emergent paradigm has focused
disproportionately on the two most dramatic cases: Hungary and Poland (Müller 2014;
Herman 2016; Kelemen and Orenstein 2016) and on the symptoms – executive aggrandisement
and illiberal nationalism – that are most characteristic of the trajectories of those
states. In bringing together contributions in this special issue, we attempt to correct for the
empirical and thematic biases of this paradigm by examining democratic trajectories
through the prism of cases other than Hungary and Poland in both Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) and in nearby postcommunist regions, the West Balkans and the former
Soviet Union (FSU). We use the term CEE as a matter of convention, to refer to post-communist
states that are EU members, which – partly in consequence of EU accession – had
been considered to be among the post-communist world’s more successful and stable
democracies.2
The CEE sub-region has been one of the main focuses of the “backsliding”
agenda, as democratic deterioration was unexpected and is weakly explained by existing
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Seán Hanley s.hanley@ucl.ac.uk
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS
2018, VOL. 34, NO. 3, 243–256
https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2018.1491401
scholarship. Introducing perspectives from the West Balkans and two non-EU countries in
the FSU (Moldova and Ukraine) allows us to consider what the significant bodies of scholarship
about failing or partial democratisation that developed there can tell us about CEE’s
present and future trajectories.
In this introductory essay, drawing on the contributions to this collection, we take in five
themes. 1/ we first sketch democratic trajectories in the CEE region, by contrasting the oftstudied
cases of Hungary and Poland with other CEE cases and post-communist cases
stretching from Southeast Europe to the Baltics. In the following sections we then
expand on three sets of inter-related theoretical and comparative issues that emerge
from the contributions: 2/ the need to problematise the notion of democratic backsliding,
not simply as a label, but also as an assumed regional trend; 3/ the need to more adequately
integrate the (possible) decline of liberal-democratic political institutions with illiberal
socio-economic structures, whether in the form of oligarchical power concentrations
or more diffuse, corrupt networks; and 4/ the need to (re-)examine the trade-offs between
democratic stability and democratic quality and to ask whether efforts to improve democracy
as a system of government destabilise it as a regime. Finally, 5/ in our conclusion we
build on these critiques to make a case for studying democracy and its fate in CEE as a
more genuinely interdisciplinary undertaking, breaking free of some of the more narrowly
institutionalist assumptions of comparative political science.
1. Multiple (un)democratic trajectories across CEE
In the late 1990s at the end of the first post-communist decade Central and Eastern Europe
was widely seen as a clear, if not unqualified, democratic success story. Scholars of the
region’s democratisation concluded that not only were early fears of democratic breakdown
fuelled by flawed analogies with Latin America misplaced (Greskovits 1996), but
that successful CEE democracies such as Hungary and Poland had rapidly consolidated
(Linz and Stepan 1996) and “passed by the point of no return” making “authoritarian reversal”
inconceivable (Ekiert and Kubik 1998, 579–580).
There is a now broad consensus that this optimistic picture of democratisation in East
Central Europe needs revising and that the region is in serious democratic difficulties.
There is also widespread agreement that these difficulties go beyond the problems of
poor democratic quality usually understood as legacies of communist or pre-communist
authoritarianism, or side-effects of transition politics: stunted civil societies; disengaged
and distrustful citizens; parties lacking social roots; corrupt and ineffective public administration
(e.g. Howard 2003; Van Biezen 2003; Innes 2014). Instead, the region appears
to be mired in a range of negative phenomena subsumed under the label “democratic
backsliding” which impact on democracy as a regime threatening precisely such an authoritarian
reversal.
Moreover, the new dynamics of backsliding are best illustrated by the one-time democratic
front-runners Hungary and Poland. In Hungary the conservative-national Fidesz
party of Viktor Orbán since winning a landslide election victory in 2010 has proceeded
to dismantle liberal checks and balances; skew the electoral process in its own favour;
extend partisan control over state agencies, media and civil society; and develop a
harshly anti-liberal ideology, which de-legitimises left-wing and liberal competitors as
foreign to the national community (Herman 2016). As two subsequent general election
244 L. CIANETTI ET AL.
victories – albeit with a skewed and uneven playing field – show, Orbán’s regime of
“national co-operation” rests on a base of substantial popular support. A similar, but
faster, dynamic appears to be playing out in Poland under the government of Law and
Justice (PiS), a party with a Christian conservative-national ideology comparable to that
of Fidesz, following a decisive election victory in 2015 which gave PiS an absolute majority
in parliament (Ost 2016).
The cases of Hungary and Poland appear at first sight paradigmatic. They represent the
largest and sharpest drops in levels of democracy in ECE (V-Dem 2017; Nations in Transit
2018) and sharply contradict earlier positive expectations of democratisation in the region.
Poland as the largest CEE state, and one with considerable geo-political significance, has
been a particularly worrying case. Political dynamics in the two states map on to broader
global patterns of democratic regression in taking the form of “executive aggrandisement”
triggering a slide from democracy towards some form of hybrid regime (and, if continued,
into full authoritarianism), rather than the direct breakdown of democracy into autocracy
as seen in classic military or executive coups (Bermeo 2016). The coming to power of
Fidesz and PiS in watershed elections also fits one of the modes of transition to non-democratic
rule identified by Tomini (2017): the electoral victory of a democratically disloyal
opposition.3
The fact that both Fidesz and PiS framed their nationalistic, socially conservative
appeals in populist terms also fits them into a broader global populist trend challenging
liberal democracy (Judis 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Müller 2017), although it
is unclear whether populism in all forms should be regarded as an anti-system ideology.
However, the clearest CEE cases of backsliding – Hungary and Poland – lie outside the
main causal patterns observed globally in the Third Wave era: a slide from democracy into
a hybrid or authoritarian regime type is usually underpinned by sharp social inequality
compounded by ethnic divisions (Tomini 2017; Tomini and Wagemann 2017). Patterns
of ECE backsliding, therefore, need to be explained in more regionally specific terms.
Authors have posited a plethora of causal factors: the falling away of EU accession conditionalities
(Mungiu-Pippidi 2007; Rupnik 2007; Rupnik and Zielonka 2013; Sedelmeier
2014) and the Union’s subsequent inability to sanction backsliding member states; CEE
elites’ lack of liberal-democratic values (Innes 2014); socio-economic frustrations generated
by the Great Recession and the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis (Bohle and Greskovits
2009); institutionalised patterns of polarised populist competition (Enyedi 2016); and the
geo-political influence of Russia (Shekhovtsov 2016).
With some partial exceptions, this plethora of causes has, however, rarely gelled into
a coherent comparative perspective offering compelling explanations of the range of
varieties of bad governance and democratic malaise emerging across the CEE region.
One reason for this, we believe, is a tendency to view the whole region through the
prism of the Hungarian and Polish experiences, taking these as a paradigm likely to
be reproduced to a greater or lesser or degree elsewhere. While acknowledging the
empirical variation across the CEE region, the debate on democratic backsliding has
revolved around the scenario of an illiberal populist party winning an absolute parliamentary
majority and embarking on a conservative-nationalist project, concentrating
executive power, stripping away or disabling checks and balances, and exerting partisan
control over public institutions.
This can obscure as much as it reveals. As Hanley and Vachudova (this collection) find in
their article on the rise of Andrej Babiš and his ANO movement in the Czech Republic, even
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS 245
in a neighbouring country the “Hungarian” or “Polish” paradigm can be made to fit only
loosely. Moreover, as the Czech case underlines, it is difficult and perhaps premature to
think in terms of consolidated outcomes across CEE, suggesting that trajectories and processes
may be a better focus of enquiry.
Indeed, synthesising the findings of the studies collected here suggests that– rather
than the steady one-directional dynamic process of deterioration implied by “backsliding”
– a relatively stable but low-quality-democracy is the norm for political regimes where
checks on progress towards high-quality liberal democracy are already embedded. In
some cases, this may imply minimal change; in others, weakly consolidated democracy
may swerve or careen (Slater 2013; Buštíková and Guasti 2017) without a lasting shift
towards a less democratic regime form. Concretely, this means that the cases of
Hungary and Poland, while exhibiting some characteristics shared across the region,
serve as a poor guide for wider understanding in CEE. The wider regional picture might
be more one of (often stable) democratic malaise than of Hungary/Poland-style
backsliding.
The authors in this special issue broadly agree in identifying relatively stable forms of
bad governance that serve to block the path to fuller democracy and, in some cases,
might open opportunities for democratic deterioration. Taking a long-term perspective
on the CEE region, Dimitrova (this collection) bemoans the fact that citizens in the
region have not yet managed to compel political-economic elites to universalise access
to resources. This certainly chimes with Hanley and Vachudova’s account of the Czech
case (this collection), even if the problem of state capture there appears more limited
and contested than in Dimitrova’s long durée account. We explore the problem of state
capture at greater length in section 3.
A shared feature of the relatively high-functioning democratic regimes of Estonia and
Latvia (Cianetti, this collection) and the less democratic competitive authoritarian regimes
of the former Yugoslavia (Bieber, this collection) is that each faces an apparent trade-off
between a flawed stability, on the one hand, and an imperative to push for higher
quality democracy that might destabilise that stability. The Baltic states of Estonia and
Latvia, easily the best performing CEE democracies covered in these pages, are seen as
having excelled in implementing economic and political reforms demanded by the EU,
but as having done so at the cost of limiting democratic contestation over economic
policy and marginalising the voices of ethnic minorities. In the Western Balkans, where
democratic deterioration can be observed in most cases relative to a decade ago, a
kind of stability has been achieved through the cooperation of the EU, with autocratic
leaders willing to make concessions internationally (especially on geopolitical and security
issues) at the cost of civil society development, media independence and democratic pluralism
domestically. This trade-off between democracy and stability is explored at greater
length in the fourth section of this chapter.
Both Dawson’s Serbia-Bulgaria comparison and Dimitrova’s broad regional survey explicitly
question the usefulness of the term “backsliding” to describe the ongoing development
of democracy in the region. This is in part because neither is convinced that
success in democratisation has even occurred since 1989 – an idea explored further
below. Both in Dawson’s culturalist account of the prevailing weakness of liberal norms
in everyday citizen discourse and Dimitrova’s “Tilllyan” political-economic perspective,
which stresses the capture of state resources by elites, the cases under consideration
246 L. CIANETTI ET AL.
seem to have failed to produce democracies in which citizens truly inhabit formal democratic
institutions. While the divergence between their approaches is wide methodologically,
they agree that the CEE countries they investigate are relatively stable electoral
regimes, but bear some illiberal characteristics (whether political-economic or cultural)
that leave them with a low quality of democracy.
This special issue also turns its gaze Eastwards beyond the CEE region, to see whether
lessons can be drawn from wider cross-regional comparison. These cases to the East,
Moldova and Ukraine (Knott, this collection), show a possible hybrid regime end-game
for CEE countries with deteriorating democratic institutions. This may not necessarily be
full authoritarianism, but a hybrid, dynamic equilibrium that might extend the horizon
of the transition from democracy indefinitely.
In the following sections, we examine some theoretical and comparative issues that
emerge from the special issue contributions’ attempts to map out these forms of democratic
malaise.
2. The need to problematise “backsliding”
Backsliding is most obviously problematic as a concept because it assumes a prior period
of successful democratisation that is very much open to debate. As Dawson (this collection)
notes, the scholarly consensus before 2007–8 that most CEE countries had
reached the stage of “democratic consolidation” relied on measurements drawn from
institutionally-focused indices (such as Freedom House) and the equally institutionally
focused EU accession criteria. In his contribution, he argues that this stress on formal institutions
is at odds with most contemporary democratic theory in which practices of deliberation
take centre stage. After constructing an alternative theoretical framework for the
evaluation of democracy based on the extent and content of public sphere discussion,
Dawson’s ethnographic comparison of Serbia and Bulgaria brings forward two eye-catching
findings. First, that neither state comes close to democratic consolidation in the sense
of anchoring democracy in a growing civic culture in which most citizens increasingly can
and will uphold liberal norms4
–liberal democratic norms in both states are still easily
eclipsed by illiberal ones. Second, that, contrary to institutionally-oriented measurements
and EU accession judgements, it was Serbia that supported a more vibrant and contested
public sphere, more inclusive of liberal ideas. The wider implication is that “backsliding” in
CEE might be understood as an artefact of a partial and flawed system of democratic
measurement prone to inflating the democratic credentials of states whose political
elites are willing to undertake superficial institutional reforms without any broader societal
process to validate and embed the values implied by those institutions.5
Dimitrova (this collection) also departs from institutional measures of democratisation,
albeit in a different direction. Her perspective follows Charles Tilly (2007) in viewing democratisation
as a process that plays out over the historical long term through social mobilisation
and contention. While she stresses the elite capture of resources in what, from her
long durée view, are still the early days of post-communist democratisation, she cautions
against seeing illiberal populist movements as necessarily ruinous of democracy. Given the
role of political contention in the democratisation process historically, shorter term ebbs
and flows, including perhaps episodes of backsliding and democratic regression, are to
be expected. They have certainly marked the histories of established Western democracies
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS 247
(Berman 2017) – and, in the view of some political scientists, may be doing so again (Foa
and Mounk 2017; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) although this interpretation is open to question
(Norris 2017). This implies that we ought not to read current developments in CEE
simply as a period of “backsliding” evidenced by institutional erosion and illiberal populism.
Rather, taking a process-oriented, Tillyan perspective focused on state-citizen
relations, as Dimitrova does, may reveal not just negative but also positive signs in
current developments in CEE.
However, Dimitrova’s perspective is, paradoxically, simultaneously both more pessimistic
and more optimistic than the standard backsliding narrative of institutions being
suborned by illiberal populists. More pessimistic, because it claims that citizens and civil
society have not, up to now, succeeded in forcing post-communist elites to provide universal
and equal access to resources and institutions and to relinquish their privileged position
exploiting the political and economic resources of the state. More optimistic, because
it interprets the current period of unrest and polarisation as a struggle to hold elites to
account through emerging mechanisms of popular mobilisation. These include movements
employing discourses defending liberal democracy but also, and provocatively,
illiberal movements such as the citizens’ initiatives to ban gay marriage, which are also
part of the wider process of the “massification” of politics paralleling, in some ways, processes
of democratisation in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This tough-minded, but optimistic reading of CEE democratisation is, however, potentially
tempered by lessons from other post-communist regions. As Knott (this collection;
see also Hale 2014; Way 2015) makes clear, despite periodic bouts of instability, including
electoral challenges and protest movements, hybrid regimes in the post-Soviet space have
proved remarkably adaptable and adept at (re-)stabilising themselves thus preventing a
decisive or long-lasting democratic breakthrough. Patterns of (un)democratic development
in South Eastern Europe, whose more strongly party-based political systems and
involvement in EU integration processes offer a closer analogy to CEE, tell a similar story.
As Bieber (this collection) highlights, ruling parties in South East Europe in the 2010s were
able to contain or reverse the pressures for democratisation of the 2000s, to establish forms of
competitive authoritarian government distinct from those of the 1990s. Familiar moves in the
direction of “executive aggrandisement” – a decline in press freedom, the erosion of independent
institutions, reliance on informal control of the state administration and the strategic use
of crises – were supplemented by the strategic use of ideology and other legitimising tools.
Ruling parties that built hybrid regimes in South East Europe often (re-)took office as self-proclaimed
pro-European reformers, with Western political and financial backing, actively
seeking inclusion in mainstream European party families and the EU.
The variation of hybrid regimes across time and the adaptability and resilience of the
political forces underpinning them may have lessons for CEE and, in particular, for
Hungary and Poland where backsliding has been spearheaded by illiberal “mainstream”
parties. Comparison across post-communist (sub-)regions may also help throw the distinctness
of CEE backsliding into sharp focus.
3. Bringing in illiberal socio-economic structures
Dimitrova’s stress on the need for a perspective on CEE’s democratic difficulties that is
explicitly informed by the real distribution of economic and social power is echoed by
248 L. CIANETTI ET AL.
other contributors to this collection. There is a voluminous literature on the relationship
between patterns of socio-economic development and forms of (un)democratic political
development (for overviews see Diamond 1992; Bunce 2001; Robinson 2006). In the
context of CEE democratisation, however, much of the literature focused on how new
democracies in the region could manage simultaneous economic and political transition,
and why the economic dislocation suffered by many in the region did not bring forth
destabilising mass protest (Greskovits 1996; Ekiert and Kubik 1998; Vanhuysse 2006).
Later research sought to establish whether there was a distinct model of post-communist
capitalism, noting that, while there was variation, the distinct neo-liberal inspiration of
capitalism marked almost all societies in CEE (Bohle and Greskovits 2012; Innes 2014;
Appel and Orenstein 2018). This meant that CEE democracies were “born hollow” not
simply in terms of having weakly rooted institutions of political and civil society, but
also in terms of economic society and economic actors.
The question posed is whether forms of democratic “hollowness” – which, while different
in scope and origin, loosely parallel the “normal” decline of party-electoral politics in Western
Europe – and authoritarian backsliding are related. Béla Greskovits’ (2015) seminal paper
found no systemic relationship between backsliding and hollowing in CEE and his later
research suggested that, far from being a simple block on democratically disloyal elites, in
a case such as Hungary the relative strength (of parts of) the civil society – concretely, conservative
civic movements and civil society organisations (Greskovits 2017) – facilitated
backsliding.
However, as Hanley and Vachudova, Dimitrova, and Cianetti (all this collection) note,
other than in Hungary and Poland, in CEE systemic threats to democracy have come
less from electorally dominant illiberal parties capturing society and the state, than illiberal
interests in society and predatory elites capturing mainstream parties. The Estonian and
Latvian cases (Cianetti, this collection) show that the democratic threat of exclusivist
elites can take the form of impediments to higher democratic quality rather than necessarily
in the form of direct challenges to existing democratic institutions. The entrenchment
of private interests in the state and in party politics may represent an alternative route to
backsliding in states such as the Czech Republic and Slovenia with fragmented party
systems and/or where a strong socially conservative right is weak or absent (Bugarić
and Kuhelj 2015; Innes 2016).
As Hanley and Vachudova’s article on the rise of Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic
shows, this route can entail political disruption rather than the simple creeping capture
of existing institutions and parties. In such cases, where party systems do not spawn a
dominant illiberal party from their existing line-up, disruption eventually comes from
the (cyclical) rise of new anti-establishment parties (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015;
Hanley and Sikk 2016). However, as the case of the Czech billionaire-turned-politician
Babiš shows, these “anti-corruption” parties can themselves be vehicles for vested economic
interests. Hanley and Vachudova’s study also demonstrates the need to move
beyond generic models of CEE political economy or vague reference to anonymous offstage
business interests: a closer look at Babiš’s origins highlights the presence of a
small influential group of oligarchical billionaires who sit atop a society with a famously
equal distribution of income and an economy powerfully shaped by FDI (Drahokoupil
2008).
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS 249
Babiš’s displacement of traditional parties – and the “regional godfathers” who informally
controlled them – also highlights how perspectives developed in the post-Soviet
context can inform the study of CEE’s evolving democratic difficulties. The clash of clans
and oligarchs is a common but complex phenomenon which, as Knott (this collection)
suggests, can be the crude underpinning of a form of pluralism. However, the direct
entry of an oligarch into politics as party founder is a rare and risky undertaking, which
exposes the oligarch-politician to direct, public scrutiny and cuts off the usual options
for hedging bets by discreetly backing other parties. In this sense, the Moldovan postSoviet
case resonates with the Czech one. Both highlight the need to study more
closely the fusion of political, economic and media power, which is commonly studied
in a compartmentalised way or fed into aggregate indexes of democracy and good governance
as simple numerical scores.
What is less clear is whether hollowness, corruption and state capture – while stabilising
hybrid regimes in Moldova and Ukraine or consolidating party-based hybrid regimes in
South East Europe – can in and of themselves end democracy. There is, to be sure,
broad agreement that they are detrimental to democracy in multiple ways. As Dimitrova
(this collection; see also Tudoroiu (2015)) notes, state capture “ … subverts the very fabric
of young democracies, undermining both input legitimacy (political representation) and
output legitimacy (effective public policies/universal provision of public goods) … ”.
This, she argues, may aid backsliding by prompting public withdrawal from politics or
lending credibility to illiberal and authoritarian discourses. However, few authors go as
far as Klíma (2015; see also Klíma and Mendilow 2016), who concludes that the interpenetration
of corrupt informal business interests and traditional parties had already degraded
Czech democracy into a hybrid regime long before the rise of the billionaire populist Babiš
and his anti-corruption movement ANO. This implies that the appearance of populist
forces like Babiš’s ANO is a potentially ambiguous phenomenon, articulating genuine
societal demands for political reform and pushing issues of good governance centre
stage, but further loosening the weak checks and balances that characterise post-communist
democracy and embedding private interests at the core of the state.
4. Maintaining democratic’ stability versus improving democratic quality?
The idea that there may be a trade-off between efforts to improve democratic quality and
maintain the stability of low quality democracies is the third theme which emerges across
the collection. Unsurprisingly given the focus in the wider literature on Hungary and
Poland, much discussion about backsliding has so far focused on issues of democratic
stability. As the Hungarian and Polish governments have proceeded to undermine democratic
institutions, the key preoccupation of the backsliding debate has been the resilience
of democratic institutions and democracy as a regime. By broadening our perspective
beyond the Hungarian and Polish cases, this special issue challenges facile equivalences
between democratic stability and quality, showing different ways in which the stability
of institutions may be sustained – rather than threatened – by their low-democraticquality
features. While all the contributions recognise the importance of functional democratic
institutions, several also highlight how stability per se does not necessarily mean
(good) democracy, as it can rest on elements of exclusion, elite control, and popular
apathy.
250 L. CIANETTI ET AL.
Stability is premised on general agreement on the “rules of the game” among key political
players. While this can apply to any regime’s chance of survival, the literature on
democratic consolidation has put particular emphasis on the need for such basic agreement
to guarantee the persistence of democratic institutions as the “only game in
town” (Linz and Stepan 1996; Schedler 1998; see also Rhoden 2013). However, democratic
stability is not the same as democratic quality.
The difference (and, in fact, the potential trade off) between the two was already envisioned
in Lijphart’s (1975) early works on consociationalism. Although he subsequently
tended to stress the advantages of consociational stability for plural societies, Lijphart
initially also highlighted the risks entailed by the enforced stability that characterises consociationalism,
and especially the risk of promoting elitism and de-politicising public
debate.6
In his review of the democratisation and quality of democracy literatures,
Munck (2007) stressed that democratic stability and democratic quality are to be seen
as two separate research agendas, as they concern two distinct aspects of the issue.
This distinction has been usefully employed in, for example, the study of Latin America,
where it has been argued that economic (neo-)liberalism has at the same time sustained
democratic stability but undermined democratic quality (Weyland 2004).
Several contributions to this special issue highlight aspects of this trade-off, which
seems to persist in different forms across different stages of democratic consolidation.
At the low end, the post-Soviet countries analysed by Knott (this collection) and the
South-Eastern European countries discussed by Bieber (this collection) provide examples
of stability in the context of hybrid regimes. In Moldova and Ukraine, stability is founded
on the balance between popular pressures for greater and better democracy, on one hand,
and competing elites’ resistance and control over existing institutions on the other. This
balancing act, Knott argues, creates the conditions for a relatively stable dynamic equilibrium.
In South-East Europe, as Bieber explains, stability has taken precedence over
genuine democratisation – not least in the eyes of EU policymakers – creating the conditions
for illiberal elites to establish and consolidate their power while playing the “Europeanisation”
card, thus defusing contestation from below. This has often been termed
“stabilitocracy” (Pavlović 2016, 2017; Bieber 2017).
Estonia and Latvia (Cianetti, this collection) illustrate the complexities of the stabilityquality
trade off at a higher level of democratisation. The two Baltic countries have in many
respects been success stories, surging ahead from their Soviet past to establish functioning
democratic institutions, which show little sign of being vulnerable to backsliding. Their stability
is all the more surprising as an ethnically divided polity is typically expected to breed
instability(see,forexample,Ekiert,Kubik,andVachudova2007,14).Whiletheseachievements
are not to be dismissed, it is also important to look at the price ofsuch stability. Cianetti argues
that Estonia and Latvia’s stability has been founded on a double hollowness – intended to
empty out (or keep empty) democracy of its popular component: a “technocratic hollowness”
(often observed in other CEE countries) that narrows the space for discussing and contesting
socio-economic policies (what the state is for); and an “ethnic hollowness”, which restricts
debate and political inclusion along ethnic lines (who the state is for). While the debate
about the relationship between hollowness and backsliding remains open (Greskovits
2015), the cases of Estonia and Latvia show that hollowness cannot be taken as necessarily
causing (or creating the conditions for) backsliding. On the contrary, Estonian and Latvian
doublehollowness–farfromtriggeringinstability–hasbeenaconstitutivefeatureofstability.
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS 251
Once again, paralleling Bieber’s findings on South-East Europe, an excessive focus on stability
might hinder improvements in democratic quality.
This also suggests that the increasing attractiveness of populist and “unorthodox”
parties (Pop-Eleches 2010) elsewhere in Europe could be understood as a disruption of
a hollow party competition rather than as disaffection with democracy as a regime.
While, as the cases of Hungary and Poland show, this situation can open the doors for
“backsliders” to attack democratic institutions, destabilisation of party competition
might also be necessary to revitalise and “fill up” hollow democracy.
Collectively, these contributions show that stability cannot be taken as an end in itself,
and that the relationship between stability, destabilisation, and quality of democracy must
be investigated rather than assumed. Not all forms of destabilisation of the status quo
necessarily imply backsliding.
5. Conclusion: an agenda for an interdisciplinary approach
The consensus around the success of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe that
reigned in the near-decade following EU Accession was largely rooted in the (sub-) discipline
of comparative political science with its focus on putting into place institutions,
which would constrain and cultivate political and social actors. These institutions would
gradually anchor themselves in transformed social structures and cultures, as well as
“anchoring themselves from above” in an enlarged EU (Sedelmeier 2014). Like all social
science perspectives, this has had to contend with the strength and resilience of
various “unexpected” challenges: the salience of illiberal identity politics; the degree to
which corrupt political-economic elites have reneged on democratic settlements postaccession
(Ganev 2013); the unexpected continuity and even resurgence of autocratic
Russian influence in CEE. Taken together, the extent of democratic regression in a
region considered the clearest democratic success story in the post-communist world –
proceeding most rapidly in countries, like Hungary and Poland, that were considered
democratic frontrunners – highlights the need for rethinking the ways in which
(de-)democratisation in the region is studied and understood.
This process of rethinking need not, however, take the form of the self-lacerating babyand-bathwater
critiques of practitioners of “Sovietology” after 1991 over the failure to
anticipate the speed and scale of the Soviet collapse (Cox 1994), or re-treading the
polemics of the mid 1990s about the incursion of comparativists into the study of
Eastern Europe and the relative merits of intra-regional versus cross-regional comparison
(Bunce 1995; Karl and Schmitter 1995). Most, if not all social science can expect to be
wrong in key respects – and to be wrong-footed by events. What is striking, however,
across the diverse contributions to this special issue is that all pull away from understanding
(de-)democratisation in terms of a political science-based agenda of institutional
design and institutional (de-)consolidation. Instead, many seek to bring in insights from
adjacent field such as political economy, political theory, and ethnography to get to
grips with the ways in which social, cultural and economic practices have inflected institutions
rather than being inflected by them. This suggests that the backsliding debate
may best be advanced through a new interdisciplinary synthesis along the lines of the
“contextual holism” advocated by Kubik (2013). The somewhat rigid division of the
post-communist world in three sub-regions based, in part, on perceived success in
252 L. CIANETTI ET AL.
democratisation – Central (and Eastern Europe); the (Western) Balkans; and the former
Soviet Union (Rupnik 1999; Møeller and Skaaning 2010) – may also need rethinking.
Adhering too rigidly to this familiar tripartite division might impede our capacity to
draw comparisons that will help us understand unexpected backsliding in CEE.
A useful point-of-departure exercise could be the production of better, more intellectually
pluralist measurements of democracy. While Dimitrova (this collection) follows
Charles Tilly in advocating a “processual”, political-economy based understanding of
democratisation that learns from the slow-burning universalisation of resources in
Western cases historically, Dawson (this collection) follows Jurgen Habermas and others
in seeing democratisation as rooted primarily in the deliberative practices of citizens
and only secondarily in the state, thus calling for a research strategy centred on ethnographical
fieldwork. These varied, less commonly used approaches to democratisation throw
into sharp relief the reliance of political science-based endeavours to chart democratisation
on a very narrow strand of democratic theory: the institutional checklists deriving
from Robert Dahl’s ideas about the procedural minimum criteria for democracy.
In a CEE context, we might then move to compare the historic-high democracy gradings
given to CEE countries in the mid-2000s – and the comparative research that
largely followed this evaluation – with more in-depth case studies published at the
same time, mapping aspects of democratic practice, such as political discourse, historical
memory, social justice, minority rights, corruption, public spheres, and civil societies. In
charting a way forward in the study of backsliding and other forms of democratic
malaise in CEE (and beyond), it is the complex, the uncountable, the non-linear, the
multi-causal and the long-term that must come to the fore.
Notes
1. The label “backsliding”, which originates as a religious term meaning a failure to maintain
piety and Christian faith, has been criticised because of the its moralistic and normative overtones
(Müller2014; Krastev 2016).
2. The nature of Eastern and/or Central Europe– both as identity construct, and as politically distinct
sub-region(s)– is the subject of an extensive literature. See overviews, for example,
Møeller and Skaaning (2010), Bernhard and Jasiewicz (2015), and Twardzisz (2018).
3. The primary examples he identifies are relatively new political outsider movements such as
Hugo Chavez and the Chavistas, rather than well-established parties such as Fidesz and PiS.
4. For a discussion of an alternative conceptualisation of democratic consolidation as the
absence of threat to democracy and unlikeliness of its collapse see Schneider (2008, 8–19).
5. For a wider critique of governance ratings (including on democracy), see Cooley and Snyder (2015).
6. As Dryzek (2005) notes, the elite-driven form of consociationalism that Lijphart ultimately
endorsed rested on an attempt to “silence” the public sphere.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Dr Licia Cianetti is Teaching Fellow in Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Department of
Politics and International Relations. She obtained a PhD from the School of Slavonic and East
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS 253
European Studies, University College London. Her research interests include minority politics, postcommunist
politics, and the politics of diverse cities.
Dr James Dawson lectures in Politics and International Relations at Kings College London. He is the
author of Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics (Routledge, 2016).
Dr Seán Hanley is Senior Lecturer in Politics at UCL. His research interests include party government,
the rise of anti-establishment parties, and democratic backsliding in Central Europe. He has a special
interest in Czech politics and is author of The New Right in the New Europe: Czech Transformation and
Right-Wing Politics (Routledge, 2007).
ORCID
Seán Hanley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5737-7576
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