The Hollowing and Backsliding of
Democracy in East Central Europe
Bela Greskovits
Central European University
Abstract
The essay identifies two main dangers to East Central Europe’s young democracies: ‘hollowing,’ or declining popular
involvement in democracy, and ‘backsliding,’ or destabilization and reverting to semi-authoritarian practices. It traces
the malaise of some but not all postsocialist democracies to varied combinations of hollowing and backsliding. The
main finding is an intricate pattern: in some cases the two syndromes coincide, in others they do not. There is also significant
cross-country variation in the gravity of syndromes. The region’s pure neoliberal capitalist regimes are likelier
to undermine popular political participation than those, which try to balance marketization with relatively generous
social protection for its losers. At the same time, the article finds that while the hollowing of democracy before the global
financial crisis has not necessarily been a curse, the massive participation of citizenry prior to the crisis has not
been a generalized blessing from the viewpoint of democracy’s resilience. This is substantiated by a comparative case
study of Hungary and Latvia with lessons for activists of democracy promotion and civil society development.
Introduction
Focusing on ten East Central European member states of
the EU,1
this essay explores two major challenges to the
quality and solidity of their democracies. The first of
these refers to the general European problem of declining
popular involvement in politics, termed hollowing of
democracy (Mair, 2006). The second challenge is captured
by the term backsliding, which suggests destabilization
or even a reversal in the direction of democratic
development. Backsliding is usually traced to the radicalization
of sizeable groups within the remaining active
citizenry, and the weakening loyalty of political elites to
democratic principles.
While the long-term process of hollowing of democracy
is less spectacular, the news on backsliding often
makes it to the headlines. Today analysts and the general
public are alarmed by the frequent disruptive protests
against unemployment, poverty and uncertainty stemming
from austerity, and the occasional remarkable
showing of radical right wing and other antisystem parties
at elections. In several countries of the region, especially
those hard hit by the global financial crisis and the
Great Recession (2007–09), governments have also
attempted to gain control over free media and other
institutions of democratic checks and balances, as well as
over the activity of civil society organizations.
Although the region-wide spread of economic and
political instability justifies the concerns, it is clear that
the problems faced by individual democracies are neither
uniform in kind nor equally grave. This article is motivated
by the interest in this diversity. It seeks to identify
the concrete combinations in which hollowing and backsliding
threaten the East Central European democracies,
and to grasp the logics of these combinations.
The elaboration starts with a brief overview of the literature
on hollowing and backsliding. The former traditionally
focuses on the old democracies of the west, and the
latter on the specific challenges faced by the new
postsocialist democratic orders. Although these two traditions
of thought have developed in parallel and without
much communication between their representative
authors, their relevance for understanding the current
problems and prospects of democracy in East Central
Europe calls for the integration of their insights.
Based on stylized evidence, the article then demonstrates
that hollowing and backsliding of democracy
occur in varied combinations in East Central Europe. In
some cases the two syndromes coincide, in others they
do not. There is also significant cross-country variation in
the gravity of syndromes. Hence the question emerges:
is this variation random, or is there a logic to the empirically
observed configurations? In search of an answer
the article compares in some detail Latvia and Hungary,
two extreme examples of backsliding, preceded by
democracy’s hollowing in the former but not in the
latter case. The conclusions summarize the lessons for
policy makers and activists on multiple levels and with
different tools at their disposal to combat the malaise of
democracy.
© 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12225
Global Policy Volume 6 . Supplement 1 . June 2015
28
ResearchArticle
Ruling the void vs becoming authoritarian
Hollowing of democracy is not a new phenomenon but
has long been observed and studied in western countries.
Its symptoms are variations on the theme of citizens’
exit from the democratic arena and political parties’
exit from bonds with their constituencies and alliances
with civil society organizations. In empirical terms, hollowing
refers to declining turnout at elections, waning of
citizens’ identification with parties manifested in dwindling
party membership and increasing volatility of voter
preferences as well as atrophy of parties’ relationships
with civil society (Mair, 2006, 2013).
Many of the East Central European political systems
exhibit this syndrome to an even larger extent than the
old democracies. Except for the founding elections of the
new democratic order in the early 1990s, turnout in the
East has been usually lower than in the west. Membership
in and identification with parties have never been
close to western levels (Van Biezen et al., 2012), and stable
strategic alliances between political and civil actors
have rarely been forged. Accordingly, some authors characterized
the postsocialist democracies as being ruled by
parties without civil society and influenced by political
values without parties (Rose and Munro, 2009). The hollowing
of democracy continued and even accelerated
during the Great Recession (Kriesi and Hernandez, 2014).
These similarities and differences notwithstanding,
many analysts of East European democratization opted
for alternative frameworks and terms to analyze their
subject. Their often pessimistic initial accounts identified
not the corrosive effect of massive exit but the explosive
potential of radical voice and absent loyalty (Hirschman,
1970) as the main threats to the success of Eastern Europe’s
turn to and consolidation of democracy. To paraphrase
T. S. Eliot, in the worst case the fragile Eastern
democracies were expected to pass away ‘with a bang’
of anarchy, violence, or electoral counterrevolution
exploited by authoritarian rulers, not ‘with a whimper’
like in the west where the waning of popular involvement
was seen to leave democrats with the task of
‘ruling the void’ (Mair, 2006).
In the early 1990s many scholars doubted that democracy
would ever take root in postsocialist soil. Some
analysts viewed the ‘Leninist legacy’ as being inimical
to political freedom and civic activism (Jowitt, 1992).
Others believed that building a market economy, a welfare
state, democracy, and an independent nation state
simultaneously ‘from scratch’ meant mutually incompatible
tasks (Offe, 1991). Even in the cases where democratization
had been on the agenda, rapid backsliding was
expected to be brought about by protests of victims of
social dislocation or by aggrieved electorates’ resolve to
vote out neoliberal economic reformers and bring to
power populist authoritarian rulers (Greskovits, 1998). In
fact, most of the Soviet and Yugoslav successor states
stayed authoritarian indeed, or after short-lived efforts of
democratization backslid into semi-authoritarian mixed
regimes ‘that have the distinctive profile in comparison
to full scale democracies and dictatorships of combining
elements of both types of political systems’ (Bunce and
Wolchik, 2011, p. 9).
Observers who maintained their belief that democratization
may against all odds succeed in the region, put
their faith in the EU, as the only source of hope for the
East to avoid the turbulent politics of the South, namely
Latin America in the 1970s to 1980s (Przeworski, 1991).
Hence another difference between the theories of
democracy’s troubles in Europe’s core and periphery:
while the former have not counted on external powers
to save western democracy from erosion, the latter
factored in western help in keeping backsliding at bay.
By the 2000s, the ample economic and administrative
assistance provided by the EU to its regained periphery,
including the close monitoring of accession preparations,
created optimism about the region’s future (Vachudova,
2005). Alas, the optimistic mood did not last long. Soon
after the enlargement in 2004, political turbulences in a
number of new member states, namely food riots in Slovakia,
populist nationalist government coalitions including
extremist parties as junior partners in Slovakia and
Poland, the specter of ungovernability in the Czech
Republic, and massive violent demonstrations in Hungary,
brought back with vengeance the concerns about
backsliding. As editors of a special issue of Journal of
Democracy, reflecting on the dire state of East Central
European democracies, wrote: ‘Whatever danger
remained of their reverting to authoritarianism seemed
to be removed by their entry into the EU. . .Yet today, all
are beset by sharp political conflict, and there is growing
concern about the solidity of their democracies’ (Plattner
and Diamond, 2007, p. 5).
After 2008, many East Central European democracies
were exposed to the disruptive effects of the global financial
crisis and the Great Recession. Threats of insolvency,
banking crises, collapsing export markets, International
Monetary Fund (IMF)-EU interventions and the ensuing
austerity programs paved the way to a new round of social
dislocation. All this led to growing concerns that:
the very countries, which have achieved the
greatest success in the past two decades are
now displaying serious vulnerabilities in their
still young democratic systems. Over the past
five years, Nations in Transit findings have
shown a clear backsliding in key governance
institutions across this subset of countries
(Walker and Kolaczkowska-Habdank, 2012, p. 9).
Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1 © 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
East Central Europe
29
Indeed, East Central Europe’s fragile democracies have
had to weather the crisis in circumstances in which the
fatigue of the majority of citizenry coincided with the
radicalization of a minority and the weakening democratic
loyalty of influential elite groups. That is why
answering the question – how dangerous the current situation
for democratic development really is – requires a
new integrated approach that draws on the concepts of
hollowing and backsliding of democracy simultaneously.
This seems even more important because little is known
for sure about the relationship between the erosion of
democracy’s popular content and the destabilization and
reversal of democratic order.
On the one hand hollowing ought to have an impact
on the risk of backsliding. How could democracy remain
solid, if parties’ membership and embeddedness in civil
society evaporate at the same time as citizens lose appetite
for their identification with parties, for voting at elections
and joining civil society organizations? Who
remains there to defend the system against its enemies
once its popular content atrophies? On the other hand
one could also argue that while western democracy has
been eroding for several decades, instances of its serious
backsliding let alone collapse have been rare after the
Second World War. Ironically, then, the fact that the nascent
postsocialist democracies exhibit symptoms of
hollowing to a greater extent than their western counterparts
but so far their majority has survived the recurrent
hard times without reverting to authoritarianism, may
send the message: there is a long way to go before
hollowing leads to nondemocratic outcomes.
The East Central European context complicates clarification
of the relationship between the two threats even
further. Some complications stem from the specific
manifestations of the phenomena under postsocialist
conditions, others from the possibility of alternative interpretations
of existing experience. As far as hollowing is
concerned, the notion may not be applied to the East
with the same meaning and analytic rigor as to the west,
because in the former case there has never been much
to hollow out in the first place. As argued elsewhere, in
comparison to their western counterparts, the postsocialist
democracies had been born with a ‘hollow core’
(Bohle and Greskovits, 2012). It follows that while sparse
popular involvement, that is, hollowness, is an often mentioned
feature of these new democracies, it should be
traced as much to the legacies of Soviet-type socialism
as to a process of further erosion.
Moreover, even when some analysts claim to have
found evidence of hollowing, as in the case of declining
turnout at elections, others see wild fluctuation instead
of a uniform downward trend in participation (Pacek
et al., 2009). The latter authors attribute fluctuation to
voters’ rational behavior rather than to disenchantment
with democracy: citizens are more eager to turn out at
important elections. The argument is that after the salient
issues of capitalism, democracy and EU membership
had been decided the stakes involved in elections
declined and the incentives to participate weakened.
As to the turbulent dynamics of backsliding, the main
difficulty of interpretation is that it is easier to demonstrate
backsliding as an ongoing process than to capture
the exact turning point at which the accumulation of
destabilizing strains and pressures ultimately leads to the
demise of democracy. Even if the East’s postwar past is
replete with episodes of democratic breakdown administered
by the communists in the late 1940s, and new
authoritarian leaders after the collapse of Soviet-type
socialism, the historical perspective might be of little
help to judge contemporary cases. This is because the
few ongoing semi-authoritarian projects of East Central
Europe – prominently Hungarian Premier Viktor Orban’s
illiberal state building – advance in an almost surreptitious
way via adoption of a patchwork of worldwide
existing legal and institutional ‘worst practices’ to gradually
weaken democracy until it is, to paraphrase Van
Biezen et al. (2012), ‘going, going. . .gone’.
Whether or not authoritarian-leaning leaders consciously
opt for low-key tactics of rollback of democracy
in order to remain safely under the radar screen of EU
institutions and international watchdog organizations of
democratic development, their practices tend to lead to
confusion and caution at both kinds of forums. This is
apparent at the fact that in contrast to the assessment of
many domestic and foreign experts, and after downgrading
Hungary’s democracy score for seven years in a row,
the 2014 Nations in Transit report of Freedom House still
classifies Hungary as ‘consolidated democracy’.
Hollowing and backsliding in East Central
Europe
To get an idea of the varied configurations of hollowing
and backsliding, I constructed composite indexes of both
syndromes, which allow a ranking of the postsocialist EU
member states on these dimensions.
The result of hollowing, as it stood in 2000–2007, is
proxied by data on turnout at national and European
parliamentary elections, party membership and volatility
of voter preferences. The same indicators were considered
by Mair (2006, 2013). To capture parties’ embeddedness
in society, the article relies on data which, albeit
unable to capture the exact links between party politics
and civic activism, indicates the density and clout of civil
society. This set includes the civil society sub-scores of
Nations in Transit, and data on trust in NGOs. Data on
the share of workers covered by collective agreements
and trust in religious organizations is added on the
grounds that traditionally trade unions and churchbound
organizations have been important allies of
© 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1
Bela Greskovits
30
political parties in maintaining and mobilizing their
constituencies.2
Similarly, the composite index of backsliding is based
on commonsensical and broadly comparable stylized
evidence. This includes the Bertelsmann index of democratic
transformation, Freedom House data on the freedom
of the press, the World Bank’s Voice and
Accountability and Political Stability and Absence of Violence
indices, and data on the vote share of radical rightwing
parties at national and European parliamentary
elections. Finally, I considered data on the intensity of
antiausterity protest, namely number of events, participants
and the extent of economic violence involved. The
backsliding index captures both the dynamic and static
aspects, because while its focus is on change in the hard
times of 2009–2013/14 relative to the preceding good
years of 2004–2007, it also considers the actual level of
indicators in 2009–2013/14, where possible and relevant.
The results of East Central European democracies’
simultaneous ranking on the scales of hollowing and
backsliding are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 reveals puzzling configurations. First, shown
to be the region’s most dramatic case of backsliding in
2009–2013/14, Hungarian democracy also happens to
have been the most hospitable environment for political
participation over 2000–2007. Similarly, recent instability
of Slovene democracy could hardly be traced to the prior
evaporation of its popular content. In terms of the main
focus of the article, namely the gravity of backsliding,
next to Hungary Latvia is the second (and Bulgaria the
third) extreme case. Yet, in contrast to Hungary and
Slovenia, both Latvia and Bulgaria rank high on the scale
of hollowing as well. In line with the opinion of other
observers, the Czech, Slovak and Polish democracies
appear to have been the least challenged by hollowing
and backsliding alike. Therefore, especially the Czech and
Slovak cases seem to be ideal contexts to study the factors
of success in keeping both dangers simultaneously
at bay. Finally, Estonia constitutes the polar opposite of
Hungary. Ranked as the least participatory in the region,
Estonian democracy seems to have suffered the least
from backsliding during the crisis.
Is there a logic which can capture the actual relationships
between hollowing and backsliding in individual
democracies? While a systematic comparison of all the
cases is beyond the scope of this essay, Table 1 helps us
identify some commonalities and differences, which were
established in earlier research (Bohle and Greskovits,
2012) and are likely to be relevant for the current state
of democracy in the region.
First, all the eroded democracies in the lower cells (the
Baltic states, Bulgaria and Romania) have meager welfare
states. In contrast, their counterparts in the upper cells
(the Visegrad states and Slovenia) have much more generously
spent on social protection, even if with the
exception of Hungary their welfare states have typically
shrunk over the 2000s. Most countries in the latter group
have also been more equal than those in the former. Is
there a relationship between welfare expenditure, equity
and the extent of popular involvement in democracy?
Second, the Baltic states as well as Bulgaria and Romania
stand out for their relatively prudent fiscal and monetary
policies. These countries typically kept fiscal deficit,
government debt (albeit not private foreign debt), and
overall public expenditures low and established effective
institutional safeguards of macroeconomic stability. In
this respect, the experience of the Visegrad countries
and Slovenia is much more mixed. Is there a relationship
between stability-oriented macroeconomic governance
and the hollowing of democracy?
Third, only three of the five participatory democracies,
namely the Czech and Slovak republics and Poland,
could escape the most devastating consequences of the
global financial meltdown: banking crises, austerity programs
with or without IMF-EU tutelage, record deep
recessions, skyrocketing unemployment and impoverishment.
All the rest of democracies, whether hollow or not,
suffered disproportionately and witnessed much more
disruptive protests of aggrieved losers (Beissinger and
Sasse, 2012). Is it then exposure to the crisis and its management
that account for most of the difference? If so,
how to make sense of the striking variation in the gravity
of backsliding in the similarly eroded Estonian and Latvian
democracies, especially that the Baltic states were
particularly hard hit by the financial crisis and ensuing
recession?
To answer at least some of the above questions and
thereby learn about the relationship between hollowing
and backsliding of democracy, the article will contrast
below the two cases, which are most similar in the latter
but highly dissimilar in the former terms: Hungary and
Latvia.3
The sources and logics of democratic malaise
in Hungary and Latvia
As explanation of the large difference in the extent of
erosion of popular involvement in Hungarian and Latvian
democracies the following is proposed. Both countries
‘returned to Europe’ after multiple and simultaneous
transformations. Yet, while in Latvia the politics and policies
characterizing each major area of systemic change,
namely building an independent nation state, welfare
state, market economy and democracy (Offe, 1991)
tended to contribute to the hollowing of democracy, in
Hungary they typically conspired against hollowing.
Policies to (re)build the nation state restricted the
electoral base and thus popular democratic involvement
in Latvia but not in Hungary. The nonparticipatory character
of Latvian democracy can be partly traced to a
Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1 © 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
East Central Europe
31
‘birth defect’ in the sense that the new state introduced
a restrictive citizenship law in the early 1990s that
denied citizenship and thus the right to vote for all
those Russians who had arrived under the Soviet era:
almost one-third of the country’s population. In contrast,
rebuilding the independent nation state did not bring
about restrictions of citizenship and democratic rights in
Hungary.
Both the meager Latvian and the relatively generous
Hungarian welfare systems protected certain social
groups more than others. However, the selectivity of welfare
state might have had a detrimental impact on popular
democratic involvement much more in Latvia than in
Hungary.
In Latvia, the new agenda of nation building under
threat was consistent with a specific pattern of welfare
Figure 1. Hollowing (2000–2007) and backsliding (2009–2013/14) of East Central European democracies (lowest rank = 1, highest
rank = 10).
10
7
2
4
3
6
5
9
8
11
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Hungary Slovenia Czech R. Slovakia Poland Romania Lithuania Latvia Bulgaria Estonia
backsliding
hollowing
Sources for sub-indexes of hollowing: IDEA Database; Kriesi and Hernandez, 2013; Van Biezen et al., 2012; Freedom House: Nations in
Transit, 2014a; Visser, 2013; EUROBAROMETER 68, 2008; Beissinger, 2012. Sources for sub-indexes of backsliding: Kaufmann et al., 2014;
Bertelsmann Transformationsindex, 2014; Freedom House: Freedom of the Press, 2014b; Mudde, 2014; Beissinger and Sasse, 2012.
Table 1. A map of hollowing and backsliding of democracy in East Central Europe
Index of backsliding Low: rank 1–5 High: rank 6–10
Index of hollowing
Low: rank 1–5 Low hollowing/low backsliding
Czech
Republic
Slovakia
Poland
Low hollowing/high backsliding
Hungary
Slovenia
High: rank 6–10 High hollowing/low backsliding
Estonia
Lithuania
High hollowing/high backsliding
Latvia
Bulgaria
Romania
© 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1
Bela Greskovits
32
provisions. On the one hand, spending on benefits that
were accessible for citizens and noncitizens alike – i.e.
health care, pensions, or active and passive labor market
policies – was subject to strict control. On the other
hand, the few areas where the country’s welfare system
was less meager – i.e. public sector employment and
spending on higher education – happened to be those,
which had a larger potential to distribute benefits above
all to the titular majority as access could be limited
through requirement of citizenship and/or official language
proficiency.
The Hungarian welfare system envisaged protection –
through liberalized access to disability and early retirement
pensions, benefits for the unemployed and families,
and encompassing schemes of public health care and
education – against decline in social hierarchy due to
material deprivation and status loss. Protection has been
granted above all to those who had acquired a fair social
status under socialism. In contrast, Hungary’s sizeable
Roma population was deprived of sufficient protection
against the threat of a decline to underclass status. Roma
have had no means to combat exclusion, as they had
few allies among the better off, and were passive in
democratic politics. Similarly, the generational distribution
of benefits reveals a tendency of the welfare system
to protect age groups endowed with, and neglect those
without, political resources. As a consequence, while in
Hungary children and certain groups of youth run high
risks of becoming poor, the risk of poverty gradually
declines with ageing, and reaches its bottom in the oldest
generations. This is in striking contrast with the
situation in Latvia, where mainly elderly people are
affected by impoverishment.
In sum, in Hungary social protection is geared towards
satisfying those groups on whose vote, contentious
behavior and loyalty political success ultimately depends.
In turn, those unprotected by the welfare system were
the ones whose political participation was the least likely
anyway, namely the Roma and the youth. Inclusion/
exclusion via the welfare system have thus kept the hollowing
of Hungarian democracy at bay, albeit at the cost
of a deepening divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have
nots’ of the political clout. In Latvia, the meager welfare
state contributed to the deprivation and political apathy
of those – pensioners and industrial workers – whose
political involvement was otherwise likely and could have
perhaps saved Latvian democracy from becoming a
showcase of popular disinvolvement.
Finally, ‘depoliticization’ of economic policy making
might have further undermined the incentives for democratic
participation, because it diminished the number of
policy areas subject to democratic popular control. Depoliticization
of policy making was more effective in Latvia
than in Hungary, where the position and practice of institutional
safeguards of macroeconomic stability, namely
budgetary discipline and central bank independence,
remained politically contested.
While these differences help us better understand the
structural conditions of Latvia’s hollow and Hungary’s
vibrant democracy they tell us little about the content of
popular political involvement and about its driving forces
and relationship with democracy’s destabilization and
backsliding during hard times. To learn about the latter
additional factors must be considered.
Different as they are, in 2008 both the Hungarian and
Latvian economies were among the first put on test by
global market actors. Both countries failed the test and
became ‘hot spots’ of the financial crisis. What went
wrong in Hungary, was that both public welfare spending
and foreign currency denominated loans to private
households and firms spiraled out of control of successive
left-liberal governments. What went wrong in Latvia?
Even if – unlike Hungarian authorities – Latvian conservatives
stayed committed to prudent fiscal policies amidst
fast growth and abundant international finance they
opted for a mortgage and housing boom to promote
middle class living standards (Bohle, 2010; Kattel and
Raudla, 2013). By the late 2000s it became clear that
these strategies of indebted development were built on
shaky global foundations. Hungary’s and Latvia’s export
competitiveness plummeted, current account deficits and
external debt soared. Both countries fell from international
grace, and had to turn to the IMF and EU for financial
rescue packages. In exchange they implemented
austerity programs, which triggered intense social and
political protest.
A comparison of the turbulent events at the turning
point of the global financial crisis and Great Recession
helps highlight the relationship between Hungary’s
vibrant and Latvia’s hollow democracy on the one hand,
and the form and extent of democracy’s backsliding in
both polities on the other.
In terms of the intensity of protests during the crisis,
both countries rank high in comparison with other regional
eruptions of contentious politics (Beissinger and
Sasse, 2012). However, while the Latvian protest wave
occurred abruptly after an extended period of relative
social peace, the antiausterity protests in Hungary were
part and parcel of an almost decade-long upward trend
in the number of protest events. While protest over the
2000s took many forms and was motivated by a variety
of material or ideational purposes, its dynamics was driven
by an increase in antigovernment contention organized
and/or sponsored by the right-wing FIDESZ and far
right Jobbik parties, as well as right-wing and far right
social movements and organizations (Greskovits and Wittenberg,
2013; Varhalmi, 2013).
Related, Hungary and Latvia alike have seen the rise of
the region’s currently strongest far right parties, Jobbik
and National Alliance, respectively. However, as noted by
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East Central Europe
33
an expert on the European far right, it is only the success
of National Alliance that can be clearly linked to the crisis
and recession. The
far right National Alliance (NA) not only significantly
increased its representation in parliament
between 2006 and 2011; it also became a junior
coalition partner in the Latvian government. The
puzzling aspect is that the NA’s rise took place
between 2010 and 2011, after the peak of the
economic crisis in Latvia (Mudde, 2014, p. 101).
In turn, Jobbik, originating in a far right youth movement
founded in the early 2000s, has become a successful
political party during the intensifying contention of
the 2000s in the context of a vibrant and mobilized civil
society. Its ascendance was also fostered by its alliance
with a number of other far right movements, including
its paramilitary arm, the (by now banned but under several
new names re-born) Hungarian Guard. Jobbik is also
very popular among Hungarian youth, including university
students. Indeed, the party is currently one of the
main political actors on the right to amplify ‘the voice of
a disappointed generation’, namely the youth disappointed
with Hungarian capitalist democracy as it had
been formed by all the earlier generations – whether
representing the left or right of the political spectrum
(T€or€ok, 2013).
There is a third similarity in the fact that the governments
of both countries were exposed to intense protest
at a moment of policy deadlock and impaired legitimacy.
At the same time their hands were tied by too many
inherited and new commitments ranging from providing
social security through public welfare benefits and private
loans, to the task of restoring macroeconomic stability
and regaining control over foreign indebtedness.
However, it was only in Hungary that the many voices of
contention got orchestrated and organized into a powerful
and sustained ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi, 1957) by a
challenger, FIDESZ, which used a mixture of social demagoguery
and strong populist/nationalist appeals for
effective political mobilization.
Populist/nationalist leaders, prominently the leader of
FIDESZ Viktor Orban, reach out to their constituencies
using revived notions of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’,
and promise to represent them as equal members of
these communities rather than as individual citizens with
different wealth, status and divisive preferences. This
boded well for disenchanted Hungarians who by the late
2000s were felt to have been atomized by the downturn
and anarchy of global markets and betrayed by the ruling
left-liberal government. In this context of deadlock
and loss of credibility FIDESZ promised, albeit in vague
terms, to cut ‘through prevailing stalemates or collusive
agreements,’ which paralyze policy making, and resolve
‘issues previously believed to be unattainable, incompatible,
or excluded’ due to ‘exploitative dependencies upon
foreign powers’ (Schmitter, 2007, pp. 6–7, 10).
In contrast, in Latvia, resistance to austerity has
declined after the eruption of protest in the late 2000s. It
is not the case though that an alternative to a radical
neoliberal strategy of crisis management has been
entirely absent. From 2010 on, Harmony – a social democratic
party representing Latvia’s Russian speaking minority
– substantially increased its electoral support to the
point that it became the largest party in the parliament.
Even so, the lasting alliance between Latvia’s nationalists
and neoliberals – represented by fast-changing parties –
has routinely excluded Harmony from becoming part of
government coalitions and from presenting an alternative
to neoliberal austerity.
Against the above background, FIDESZ’s landslide victory
at the 2010 parliamentary elections was a foregone
conclusion, whereas the fact that the party acquired twothirds
of the mandate was accidental and is best
explained by the Hungarian electoral system. However, it
is partly due to this accident that the FIDESZ government
could move ahead so fast in rolling back Hungarian
democracy by using its overwhelming legislative power to
infuse all the democratic institutions with authoritarian
and illiberal ‘checks and balances’. A far from complete list
of changes includes softening up the legal and procedural
constraints of legislation and government; far reaching
centralization within the units of public administration;
increasing exposure of civil servants to political pressures;
stripping the parliamentary opposition off its remaining
opportunities to influence political decisions; serious
restrictions of media freedom; and the repeated modification
of the electoral law in favor of the incumbent.4
Nevertheless, since the 2010 parliamentary elections
FIDESZ won four more landslide victories at local, European
parliament and national parliamentary elections in
a row. Explanations of this spectacular performance are
many, including FIDESZ’s sustained maneuvers to change
the electoral system, party finance, or media access to
their own benefit, as well as the pervasive fragmentation
of opposition in terms of ideology, program, tactics and
leadership. Not denying the relevance of these explanations,
this essay emphasizes an additional factor: the
Hungarian right could cement its political rule partly
thanks to its sustained and successful efforts to conquer
civil society. In contrast the left-liberals lost out in political
battles not at least because their roots in civil society
have atrophied over time.
There is a historical path to this asymmetric development
(Greskovits and Wittenberg, 2013). After a period of
weakness in the 1990s, Hungarian civil society began to
regain its strength. But it strengthened in a particular
way: the left and liberal camps, which due to their inherited
and newly acquired social networks and political
© 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1
Bela Greskovits
34
capital were initially best endowed with organizational
and ideational links to civil society, have over time severed
these linkages, and depleted their reserves. This has
happened for a number of reasons. The clarification of
those requires further research. Nonetheless, one of the
reasons could be that the dominant view of democracy,
increasingly shared by (neo)liberal and postsocialist leftwing
political actors, equated citizens’ political involvement
largely with voting and only very specific forms of
civic activism, such as protection of civil rights and the
rights of minorities, but barely anything else. A second
reason might be political. Within their coalition governments
the parties of the postsocialist left and the liberals
kept competing for influence over politics and policy
making, and their struggle reinforced their mutual ambivalence,
even suspicion, towards each other’s organizational
bases in society. Sensing the opportunity, actors of
the right and later the far right have gradually worked
off their original disadvantages in social embeddedness,
have taken deeper roots in and acquired increasing
influence over civil society.
Along these lines, the subsequent victories of the right
and the enduring weakness of the left-liberal opposition
can partly be traced to the long-term ‘tectonic’ restructuring
of state/civil society relationships. Indeed, the
same process might have lasting implications for the
development and quality of Hungarian democracy. In
particular, there could be two ways in which formal politics
might have interfered with civil organization and
mobilization negatively, hampering consolidation and
ultimately contributing to the backsliding of democracy.
First, especially from 2006–2010, the left-liberal government’s
practices routinely ignored both a systematic
deliberation with, and the protest by, certain civil society
actors and kept democratic politics and policy making
‘above’ the sphere of society. This might have impeded
democratic consolidation by discouraging popular political
engagement. Second, in the same period, the rightwing
parties’ practices of bypassing parliament and
appealing to the people directly through permanent
mobilization might have impeded democratic consolidation
‘from below’ by not respecting the results of democratic
elections and undermining trust in democratic
institutions in other ways.
Conclusions
One general lesson of the inquiry is that neoliberal market
societies – especially when governed by coalitions of
‘nation builders’ and radical reformer technocrats (as is
the case of all three Baltic states) – are likelier to lead to
hollow democracies than the socially more protective and
equitable models of ‘embedded neoliberal’ capitalism characteristic
to the Visegrad states or Slovenia (Bohle and
Greskovits, 2012).
A second lesson is that while the hollowing of democracy
before the global financial crisis has not necessarily
been a curse, the massive participation of citizenry prior
to the crisis has not been a generalized blessing from
the viewpoint of democracy’s resilience during the
crisis. Instead, the essay discovered instances of backsliding
in the clusters of hollowed and vibrant democracies
alike. It is tempting to suggest, then, that a
detailed comparative account of all these cases would
help us better understand the differences of democracy’s
malaise in liberal and social democratic models
of capitalism.
A related third lesson, inferred from the comparison of
the Hungarian and Latvian cases, is that what really matters
for the solidity or backsliding of democracy is not
the vibrancy vs hollowness of the system, or the strength
vs weakness of civil society per se. What seems to make
the difference is the liberal/democratic rather than illiberal/authoritarian
ideology and purpose of the actors who
mobilize civil society organizations and their members
for political participation.5
In light of the above, the analysis of the Latvian case
points to the task of (re)building civil society essentially
‘from scratch’ and thereby strengthen democracy’s popular
content more generally. In contrast, the Hungarian
case suggests different but no less complex tasks for
those who put their faith in stable liberal and participatory
democracy. There, the rollback of democracy has
occurred in the context of a relatively vibrant, mobilized
and politicized civil society.
The main challenge in Hungary then lies in the condition
that citizens’ participation has been exploited by
political actors driven by ultimately illiberal and
authoritarian motifs. In such circumstances, ‘the tyranny
of the majority’ of ordinary citizens (Tocqueville, 2002)
lays the foundations for the tyranny of an elite minority.
Tyranny is there to stay unless civil society and thus the
terrain of everyday democratic activism is (re)conquered
from illiberal and autocratic ideas, practices and actors,
and the regained social capital is converted to new
political capital for liberal democratic forces.
The lessons for those involved in civil society development
are far from simple. Rolling back the rollback of
democracy is likely to require painstaking and slow-moving
action at multiple levels. At the level of ideas,
although demonstration of the attraction of European
legal and cultural norms and other values of open society
remains important, it will not suffice. The intellectual
agenda also should include crafting and dissemination of
a more inclusive concept of democracy in which popular
involvement is not restricted to voting and a limited repertoire
of civic activism, but is a more permanent and
better institutionalized process. Along similar lines, more
politicized e.g. Gramscian understandings of civil society
should be brought back in.
Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1 © 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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At the level of national high politics, civil actors will
have to forge new alliances with democratic parties to
resist further consolidation of populist, nationalist and
authoritarian practices and help and/or force parties to
be more responsive to their constituency.
At the grassroots level of civil organization, the difficult
task seems to be to penetrate nationalistic and other
potentially exclusive communities with more inclusive
sentiments of (local) patriotism, which are compatible
with being European. Similarly, populism should not be
condemned as coming from the devil altogether: indeed,
its all-inclusive notion could offer foundations for efforts
to reinvigorate solidarity across classes, sectors, regions,
generations and ethnic groups without denying their
existence or salience.
Notes
1. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (the Baltic states), the Czech and
Slovak republics, Hungary, and Poland (the Visegrad states), and
Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia.
2. The ten countries are ranked on each of these dimensions, i.e.
electoral participation, party membership, trade union strength,
civil society strength, etc. Similarly, they are also ranked on Voice
and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence,
index of democratic transformation, vote share of far right parties,
etc. Overall ranks on hollowing and backsliding are calculated as
unweighted averages of ranks on both subsets of indicators.
Admittedly these are crude measures, as the rankings are sensitive
to the indicators considered. Nevertheless, I find them helpful as a
first step towards more detailed and sophisticated comparisons.
3. The comparison draws on Bohle and Greskovits (2009, 2012).
4. For details see e.g. Hungary’s Illiberal Turn, 2012.
5. This is in line with the study of Berman, S. (1997) on the collapse
of democracy in the Weimar Republic, and with the nuanced
view of Ekiert (2013) on civil society and the illiberal challenge to
democracy in Eastern Europe.
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Author Information
Bela Greskovits is a University Professor at the Department of International
Relations and European Studies, and Department of Political
Science, at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. His
research interests are the political economy of East Central European
capitalism, comparative economic development, social movements,
and democratization. His most recent articles appeared in Studies in
Comparative and International Development, Labor History, Orbis, West
European Politics, Competition and Change, Journal of Democracy, and
European Journal of Sociology. His latest book, Capitalist Diversity on
Europe’s Periphery, (co-authored with Dorothee Bohle) was published
by Cornell University Press and was winner of the 2013 Stein Rokkan
Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
Global Policy (2015) 6:Suppl.1 © 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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