The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe?

Lenka Bustikova and Petra Guasti
Additional contact information
Lenka Bustikova: School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, USA
Petra Guasti: Democratic Innovations Unit, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

Politics and Governance, 2017, vol. 5, issue 4, 166-176

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Czech Republic; democracy; democratic consolidation; Eastern Europe; Hungary; illiberalism; nationalism; Poland; populism; Slovakia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/1156 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v5:y:2017:i:4:p:166-176

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v5i4.1156

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().