Backsliding versus Backlash: Do Challenges to Democracy in East Central Europe Threaten LGBTQIAP Empowerment?

Synthesizing the Scholarship: Backsliding, Backlash, and International Leverage’s Impact on LGBTQIAP Empowerment

Three literatures are of particular relevance to analyzing LGBTQIAP empowerment in post-Communist ECE, and post-Communist ECE holds the potential to test and refine these literatures further. First is the literature on democratization. ¹⁴ A second literature on backlash analyzes the mobilization of the right-wing populists and social conservatives and its implications for minorities. ¹⁵ A third literature addresses the impact of international leverage on LGBTQIAP empowerment. ¹⁶ This section aims to integrate the main arguments from each literature in a unified framework.

To begin with the scholarship on democratization and democratic backsliding, Encarnación suggests four mechanisms by which democratization improves the political status of LGBTQIAP people. Although Encarnación does not address democratic backsliding per se, by implication, it should undercut LGBTQIAP persons’ status by inverting the logic of these same mechanisms. First, by expanding political and economic rights in general, democratization tends to expand “‘citizenship,’ or membership in the polity” for marginalized and repressed groups as well. Second, democratization makes a robust civil society possible. LGBTQIAP rights do not automatically appear as societies cross various modernization thresholds of socioeconomic development and secularization: They are the result of “advocacy, contention, and even civil disobedience on the part of gay activists.” Third, democratization promotes LGBTQIAP empowerment because “[g]ay rights also depend on a strong judiciary and the rule of law,” and authoritarianism undermines both. ¹⁷ In a variety of instances in ECE, courts have been important defenders of LGBTQIAP rights against encroachment by elected politicians and state officials. The last and, according to Encarnación, “most compelling way in which democracy facilitates gay rights is to provide gay people with the most socially tolerant environment in which to live their sexuality openly and honestly.” ¹⁸ This point suggests that, if democratic backsliding is not accompanied by backlash, it will be less damaging to LGBTQIAP empowerment than if the two go together—a point to which I return below. Of course, the still recent history of discrimination against LGBTQIAP people in the established democracies of Western Europe and the United States makes it clear that democracy does not automatically translate into LGBTQIAP empowerment. Nevertheless, there are multiple reasons to expect that liberal democracy offers the most conducive environment for such empowerment. Besides the political reasons enumerated by Encarnación, this is also because the same socioeconomic developmental factors that favor liberal democracy are those that favor LGBTQIAP rights. ¹⁹

These arguments about democratization’s tendency to expand LGBTQIAP empowerment imply that, by limiting arenas for contestation, democratic backsliding will make empowerment more difficult to defend. Nancy Bermeo defines backsliding as the “state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy.” ²⁰ It is a process by which incumbent parties tilt the political playing field in their favor, undercutting constitutional and civil societal institutions to gain electoral advantage. Scholars note some common techniques by which incumbents accomplish this: undermining the fairness of elections; weakening the judicial system; restricting the media or exerting control over it; discretionary use of legal instruments to undermine civil liberties; and restricting opposition groups’ access to public resources. ²¹ We should expect these techniques to constrain LGBTQIAP empowerment regardless of the ideological tenor of the incumbent elites because they shut down avenues by which empowerment occurs and by which threats to empowerment can be challenged. To reframe the point using social movement theory, democratic backsliding constricts the political opportunity structure (POS)—that is, “the institutional features, informal political alignments, or repressive capacity of a given political system that significantly reduce [or increase] the power disparity between a given challenging group and the state.” ²²

Even if new democracies do not backslide, it may be naïve to expect a strong trend of expanding sexual citizenship, as some astute observers of LGBTQIAP politics in ECE have argued. The historian Łukasz Szulc describes as a persistent myth “the teleological narrative of the CEE’s [central and eastern Europe] ‘transition’ after 1989 from communism to Western ideals of capitalism, democracy, and ethics [i.e., progressive stances toward gender and sexuality].” ²³ Certainly, the secondary literature on the first decade of post-Communist transition describes a landscape of sparse and organizationally thin LGBTQIAP activism in most of the region. ²⁴ By one description of Poland in the 1990s, “[M]ost Polish gay organizations have only a few active members. . . . Neither do they command political power, nor do they possess any protest potential.” ²⁵ Of the main rights group in Romania, one observer wrote, “Its real task is the gradual creation of the absent community that its rhetoric invokes” ²⁶ ; of Hungary, “Hungarian gays and lesbians have been unable to set up either a national organization or efficient, lasting local constituency groups.” ²⁷ As the empirical section will show, the lackluster practice of LGBTQIAP rights in this period was accompanied by relative stagnation in legal rights and official policies toward sexual minorities. It would seem that the challenges faced by ECE’s LGBTQIAP movements to expand empowerment in the 1990s reflected Communism’s legacy of low levels of political participation and the tendency of policymakers to prioritize other issues like economic reform, relegating LGBTQIAP empowerment to the margins of the public sphere, if not invisibility. ²⁸

More than just stagnation of LGBTQIAP empowerment, democracies may experience concerted campaigns to undermine this group’s status; thus, another lens through which to read post-Communist ECE is the literature on backlash. Unlike backsliding, which has a strong institutional component and is thus more easily operationalized for comparison, backlash has both political and socio-cultural overtones. A historian like Szulc would emphasize the latter, reading post-Communism in terms of “re-traditionalization” rather than “transition.” ²⁹ Other scholars emphasize the political overtones of backlash, however. ³⁰ Just as nationalism is the politicization of ethnic identities that are not inherently political, political backlash is the politicization of cultural taboos and prejudices that, in themselves, may not lead someone to, say, vote for the far-right. As Lenka Buštíková argues, radical right parties gain support not when societies become more traditional overall, but when tradition-minded voters perceive government policies as too accommodative to minorities. ³¹ Viewing backlash as inherently political rather than essentially cultural explains why electoral support for radical right parties is far more volatile than the level of traditionalism in society—or why PiS can win elections even as sociological data reveal that Polish society is becoming less traditional and more secular. In this article, I will adopt this political conception of backlash, acknowledging that the political and cultural sides of the phenomenon can never fully be separated.

By challenging traditional norms regarding family, gender, and religious practice, as well as the status of previously dominant social groups, LGBTQIAP activism has come to symbolize all that conservative and right-wing populist parties in ECE and the former Soviet Union reject about globalization, Europeanization, and multiculturalism. ³² As Lenka Buštíková and Petra Guasti write of antigay politics in ECE, “Newly politicized identity groups with ‘alien’ demands trigger hostility and generate backlash.” ³³ The sixty or so Polish municipalities that have declared themselves “LGBT-free zones” in recent years are one extreme example. ³⁴ In Poland, but also other European countries like Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovakia, backlash against sexual and reproductive rights has received critical support from the transnational conservative networks Agenda Europe and Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP). As Wojciech Rafałowski shows, the campaign for LGBT-free zones in Poland was coordinated by Ordo Iuris, a conservative Catholic think tank with ties to Agenda Europe and TFP. ³⁵ Stoking antigay backlash serves as a tool of electoral mobilization by right-wing populist or conservative parties courting tradition-minded voters.

I expect maximum threat to empowerment when political backlash coincides with democratic backsliding: empowerment is under direct threat even as the POS and, in particular, institutional arenas for contestation are narrowing. Backlash on its own can threaten LGBTQIAP minorities by granting government power to their opponents and by depriving these minorities of a “socially tolerant environment in which to live their sexuality openly and honestly,” ³⁶ but in the absence of backsliding, institutional avenues to defend rights remain. Likewise, the impact of backsliding in the absence of backlash is ambiguous. On one hand, weakening the rule of law poses potential harm to minority groups, ³⁷ but on the other hand, there is no agent such as a far-right governing party present to exploit this weakness.

Now let us consider a third factor: international leverage. Scholarship on internationalization and, in particular, EU expansion indicates that LGBTQIAP empowerment depends on the extent to which governing elites are constrained by international institutions, networks, and public opinion. This factor has played an outsized role in ECE because of the European Union. ³⁸ Indeed, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande have described the European Union as a “cosmopolitan European empire.” It is cosmopolitan because it “conforms absolutely and unconditionally to the principle of inclusive differentiation . . . [negating] differences of caste, class, religion, or gender.” ³⁹ It is imperial because, in theory, there are no territorial limits to its expansion, so that the incentive of membership compels states on its periphery to adopt its governing principles. Thus, the European Union’s leverage is greatest for applicants and potential members “because the greatest threat . . . is the refusal of EU membership, i.e., accession into the inner circle of power of the empire.” ⁴⁰ By implication, once a country becomes a member-state, this leverage is weaker. ⁴¹ In this vein, Phillip Ayoub distinguishes between first-generation LGBTQIAP activism, which occurred in North America and Western Europe and was shaped by domestic factors, and second-generation activism in ECE, where external leverage, incentives for EU membership, and support from transnational networks facilitated the “internalization of gay rights” despite the absence of big shifts in public attitudes toward homosexuality. ⁴²

As Ayoub’s distinction indicates, international factors may attenuate the threat that democratic backsliding sets back LGBTQIAP empowerment in ECE. First, the European Union bolsters the independence of counter-majoritarian institutions that safeguard minority rights, especially courts. Through its monitoring of applicant states and the threat of external sanction vis-à-vis Article 7 even for its members, the European Union imposes an upper bound on the state’s repressive capacity. ⁴³ As described by Margaret Keck and Katherine Sikkink’s “boomerang model,” domestic activists can sometimes leverage international institutions to bring pressure to bear on hostile domestic authorities. ⁴⁴ Thus, the European Union delimits an international POS, existing above the domestic one. ⁴⁵ Finally, for states that are seeking to become members, the European Union incentivizes governing elites to signal compliance with norms of minority rights in order to enhance their international reputation. ⁴⁶ This raises the possibility of what some scholars term “pink-washing,” or “the strategic adoption of LGBT rights to gain progressive credibility and distract from other areas where human rights records are poor . . . [and encompassing] a range of practices that use the inexpensive and often easy embrace of LGBT rights to paint state actors as progressive.” ⁴⁷ Obviously, pink-washing raises questions about the state’s commitment to and the sustainability of gains in LGBTQIAP empowerment. Nevertheless, a reasonable argument may be made that empowering policy changes, even if more tactical than sincere, still constitute improvement in an otherwise homophobic social environment.

International factors may also attenuate the relationship between political backlash and LGBTQIAP empowerment. Even if governing elites scapegoat LGBTQIAP rights as unwanted EU interference in national affairs, this process may catalyze counter-mobilization dynamics that build LGBTQIAP activism and visibility in the public sphere—assuming that EU leverage imposes an upper limit on such backlash. Thus, the combination of an open international POS and a closing domestic one can be favorable for rights movements. ⁴⁸ Conor O’Dwyer’s comparison of LGBTQIAP movement development in five ECE countries posits that electoral breakthroughs by hard-right political parties tend to strengthen the organization and increase the political status of LGBTQIAP activism. ⁴⁹ Because conservative backlash threatens the taken-for-granted life routines and expectations of LGBTQIAP persons—what David Snow et al. call the “immediate collective surround”—conservative backlash reduces collective action problems and deepens internal solidarity among LGBTQIAP-movement activists. ⁵⁰ Such moments also allow homosexuality to be reframed in political terms, rather than as a moral and personal dilemma, as previously; in this way, politicization brings visibility to a previously invisible issue. The first decade of the twenty-first century, in which EU accession politics loomed large in ECE, offered a kind of sweet spot for LGBTQIAP empowerment in the otherwise unfavorable context of social intolerance of homosexuality and weak resources for rights activism. An essential backstop for this virtuous cycle was the European Union’s capacity to offer carrots and sticks to ensure applicant-states’ compliance with its norms and expectations: It could keep populists from encroaching on the rule of law and civil society.

In the following empirical analysis, I probe the following hypotheses suggested by this literature review:

Figure 1 summarizes these hypotheses visually: positive or negative signs indicate expected gains or losses of empowerment; parentheses or double positive/negative signs indicate less certain or greater empowerment changes, respectively.

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Figure 1

Expectations regarding change in LGBT empowerment based on backsliding, backlash, and international leverage

Data and Case Selection

Having laid out my theoretical expectations, this section begins the task of mapping them against the empirical record. It provides an overview of the data and primary variables. The analysis covers most, though not all, post-Communist ECE from the moment of a country’s initial classification as a post-Communist democracy through 2020: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Some countries from the region could not be included because of data limitations.

The Dependent Variable: Change in LGBT Empowerment

LGBTQIAP empowerment is a multifaceted concept consisting, at a minimum, of legal rights and the ability to practice them. Jeffrey Weeks’s notion of sexual citizenship captures this composite quality: citizenship is, in part, about the conferral of legal status and, in part, about the inclusion of previously excluded groups into the political community. ⁵¹ A focus on only one dimension of empowerment—say, legal rights—because it is easier to measure can lead to distorted comparisons.

That said, because of the costs of collecting data, scholars often make do with just one of these dimensions. They use such proxies as public opinion data or indices of rights and legal protections. Here, I use a new measure of empowerment offered by the Varieties of Democracy project, the “distribution of power by sexual orientation.” ⁵² For brevity, I will refer to it as “LGBT empowerment.” Again, I will not use the term “LGBTQIAP empowerment” in the empirical analysis given the terminology used by the Varieties of Democracy in its expert survey (see Table 1). This measure is based on a survey of country experts using the following question: “To what extent is political power distributed according to sexual orientation [in country x]?” Table 1 lists the possible responses that form the measure’s five-point scale. As a practical caveat, the scale’s highest value—in which LGBT people enjoy more power than heterosexuals—is more of a theoretical than actual possibility even in the most LGBT-friendly societies. Finland, Norway, and Sweden had scores in 2020 of 2.55, 2.67, and 2.31, respectively—that is, less than equal political power for LGBT people. For context, Figures 2 and 3 illustrate temporal and crossnational dynamics in LGBT empowerment and democratic governance in ECE. (For a clearer graphical representation, I transpose the Liberal Democracy Index [LDI] to a 0–4 scale in these figures.) Figure 2, which reports country scores in 2002, the first year when all were democracies, shows that the baseline for LGBT empowerment varies significantly in ECE. Figure 3 shows ECE’s aggregate trends over time, highlighting the long stagnation in LGBT empowerment (and slight recent uptick) as well as the onset of democratic backsliding in around 2010.

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Table 1

V-Dem Measure of LGBT Empowerment

Index value	Level of empowerment
0	LGBT [individual]s are entirely excluded from the public sphere and thus deprived of any real political power (even though they may possess formal powers such as the ballot).
1	LGBT [individual]s have much less political power than heterosexuals. LGBT [individual]s enjoy formal rights to participate in politics but are subject to informal norms that often serve to exclude them from the halls of power.
2	LGBT [individual]s have somewhat less political power than heterosexual citizens.
3	LGBT [individual]s have about the same political power as heterosexuals. Each group enjoys a degree of political power that is roughly proportional to their population.
4	LGBT [individual]s enjoy somewhat more political power than heterosexuals by virtue of greater wealth, education, and high level of organization and mobilization.

Source: M. Coppedge et al. (2021).

Note: LGBT = lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.

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Figure 2

Democracy and LGBT empowerment in 2002

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Figure 3

ECE trends in democracy and LGBT empowerment

To facilitate comparisons among countries with differing baselines, my dependent variable in the analysis below is the annual change in LGBT empowerment. This measure suits my purposes because it captures both the dimensions of formal rights and the ability of LGBT people to practice them in the political sphere. Furthermore, it offers better geographic and historical coverage than any of the alternatives. The measure does not explicitly capture policy outcomes, such as same-sex marriage, but such policies can be expected to co-vary with the level of empowerment. As a disadvantage, the measure has the potential for inconsistencies in experts’ interpretation of the survey categories, although this problem afflicts all expert surveys, including those used to code backsliding and backlash, to which I turn now.

Democratic Backsliding

There are various approaches to conceptualizing and identifying episodes of democratic backsliding. ⁵³ I am interested in identifying episodes of substantial democratic erosion from a given country’s baseline democratic practices, whatever that baseline is. (Figure 2 shows that baselines differ significantly in ECE.) Thus, I code backsliding as a dummy variable by country-year. I employ Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg’s approach because it has the advantage of most precisely pinpointing the onset of backsliding and its intensity over time. ⁵⁴ Even when backsliding is gradual, its cumulative effect may be substantial: this approach is sensitive to such cases. ⁵⁵ In terms of data, this approach relies on the LDI of V-Dem, which captures core attributes of liberal democracy: the breadth of suffrage, the quality of elections, civil rights, and so on. ⁵⁶ It is coded as a continuous variable, running from 1 (maximum) to 0 (minimum). Following Lührmann and Lindberg’s methodology, I identify backsliding episodes as those in which a substantial decline on the LDI occurs in one or more consecutive years, with the threshold for “substantial decline” being 0.1 points on the index, which is ten percent. ⁵⁷ The coding rules identify the beginning of a backsliding episode as a yearly change of 0.01 or more; the period ends “when there are no further declines on the [LDI] of 0.01 or more over four years, or if the [LDI] increases by 0.02 points or more during one of those years.” ⁵⁸ The overall deterioration of democratic institutions during the episode is the cumulative decline in the LDI.

Table 2 categorizes ECE countries in terms of episodes of democratization and democratic backsliding through 2020. The beginning of each country’s democratization episode is based not on the fall of Communism in 1989 but on the moment that country first achieves Luhrmann et al.’s threshold for “electoral democracy,” which is the lower bound for categorizing regimes as democracies. ⁵⁹ There are eight countries with significant democratic backsliding, and six without. The table shows that backsliding episodes are a relatively recent phenomenon, with most occurring since 2012. They are as likely to occur in countries with good records of democratization previously, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, as in those without.

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Table 2

Episodes of Liberal-Democratic Backsliding in ECE by Country (1990–2020)

Country	Years of democratization	Years of democratic backsliding	LDI in the year before the onset of backsliding	LDI in the last year of backsliding	Difference in LDI
Albania	2002–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA
Bosnia	1997–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA
Bulgaria	1991–2008	2009–2020	0.632	0.491	−0.141
Croatia	2000–2012; 2020	2013–2019	0.753	0.619	−0.134
Czech Republic	1990–2012	2013–2020	0.821	0.708	−0.113
Hungary	1990–2009	2010–2020	0.782	0.368	−0.414
Poland	1990–2013	2014–2020	0.824	0.487	−3.37
Romania	1991–2016; 2020	2017–2019	0.621	0.467	−0.154
Serbia	2001–2009	2010–2020	0.517	0.239	−0.278
Slovakia	1993–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA
Slovenia	1990–2011	2012–2020	0.792	0.651	−0.141
Estonia	1990–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA
Latvia	1992–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA
Lithuania	1992–2020	NA	NA	NA	NA

Source: Author’s calculations based on M. Coppedge et al. (2021).

Note: ECE = east central Europe; LDI = Liberal Democracy Index.

Empirical Analysis

To assess the average annual change in empowerment across countries for the various combinations of backsliding, backlash, and international leverage, I estimated the following ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with a three-way interaction (and random effects):

Y = α + β 1 X + β 2 Y + β 3 Z + β 4 XY + β 5 XZ + β 6 YZ + β 7 XYZ + ε

X, Y, and Z are dummy variables coding the presence or absence of backsliding, backlash, and international leverage, respectively, in a given country-year. The analysis utilizes a set of pooled time-series data clustered within countries, for a total of 374 country-years. ⁷³ Figure 4 reports the expected annual change in LGBT empowerment for each possible combination of the independent variables based on this regression model, with estimates of statistical significance. ⁷⁴ (The full regression results are reported in the Appendix.)

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Figure 4

Annual change in LGBT empowerment for various combinations of democratic backsliding, political backlash, and international leverage (n = 374)

To be clear, the aforementioned model is descriptive and cannot establish causal relationships. The number of cases available in our purview of ECE countries since the 1990s constrains our statistical leverage even when limiting ourselves to three independent variables. Since showing correlation is a requisite for establishing causal relationships, however, finding a lack of statistical significance is sufficient to call into question causal claims about setbacks to or gains in LGBT empowerment. Given the still underdeveloped state of the literature on backsliding, backlash, and LGBT empowerment, being able to dismiss causal hypotheses constitutes theoretical progress. Moreover, a correlational approach can suggest potential causal relationships to be explored later. One avenue for such exploration is analyzing individual cases, as later in this section.

Figure 4 suggests, first, that backsliding and backlash are empirically related to LGBT empowerment in post-Communist ECE, but only when they occur in combination, and second, that the direction of the relationship depends on the degree of international leverage. Considering the various scenarios in turn, the absence of both backlash and backsliding is associated with annual gains in LGBT empowerment regardless of international leverage: when leverage is low, the associated change in empowerment is 0.02 (95% confidence interval: [0.004, 0.039]); when high, also 0.02 (95% confidence interval: [0.007, 0.034]). This result offers support for Hypothesis 1 and fits with extant scholarship on democratization and LGBT empowerment, but it is perhaps surprising that substantive gains in empowerment for this category are smaller than the losses (or gains) for scenarios where backsliding and backlash coincide. As a representative example, I discuss Slovakia in the following paragraphs. Also included within this category are Estonia and Slovenia for the entire period covered; Romania for most of the period; the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century; and Croatia during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is an eclectic group—whether viewed in terms of socioeconomic development, speed of transition to the market economy, or even absolute level of LGBT empowerment. While setbacks are less likely as democratization consolidates, as Encarnación suggested, these data hardly suggest that democratization dramatically catalyzes LGBT empowerment. Improvements tend to be incremental, and there are long periods of stasis, as explored below. A less optimistic observer, such as Szulc, might use them to support a more cautionary reading of post-Communist “transition” and sexual citizenship. ⁷⁵

Second, this empirical survey does not uncover evidence that backlash or backsliding taken separately corresponds to meaningful changes in empowerment, and this finding holds regardless of international leverage. In cases of backlash without backsliding, the directions of the associations accord with the scholarship reviewed earlier—an average annual loss of −0.02 for low-leverage cases and a gain of +0.02 for high-leverage cases—but the associations are not statistically significant; the 95% confidence interval for low-leverage cases is [−0.059, 0.026], and for high-leverage ones it is [−0.006, 0.04]. Thus, Hypothesis 3 does not find empirical support. Conversely, in the backsliding-without-backlash scenario, the absence of a statistically significant relationship accords with expectations (Hypothesis 2): this scenario does not offer LGBT movements a favorable POS for advancing their goals, but neither are governing elites motivated by the kind of social conservatism that can catalyze rights activists. The 95% confidence interval for this combination’s average is [−0.021, 0.041] under low leverage and [−0.059, 0.133] under high leverage. The Czech example (discussed below) provides an illustration.

The third set of findings concerns the joint combination of backsliding and backlash. Figure 4 shows that the largest gains in LGBT empowerment have occurred not in the most democratic conditions but in those countries experiencing both backsliding and backlash—if that combination occurs under high international leverage: the average annual change in empowerment is +0.07 (95% confidence interval: [0.01, 0.121]). ⁷⁶ If it occurs under low leverage, joint backsliding and backlash is associated with setbacks to LGBT empowerment: here, the average change is −0.03, which is significant at the 90% level (confidence interval: [−0.056, −0.002]). ⁷⁷ These finding support Hypothesis 4. Comparing the magnitude of these associations is also illuminating. Empowerment gains under democratizing conditions are smaller than losses under backlash, backsliding, and low leverage, highlighting the potential threat that a reverse third wave poses to sexual minorities. Also striking is the magnitude of empowerment gains under backsliding, backlash, and high international leverage: these gains are more than three times greater than those under the democratizing conditions of neither backsliding nor backlash. These findings support the argument laid out earlier that gains by ECE’s LGBT movements have been most rapid when the domestic POS is closing but the international POS is open. This is because backlash politicizes homosexuality, and backsliding weakens counter-majoritarian institutions; however, if leverage is high, backlash can mobilize LGBT activists to a counter-response, taking advantage of international support. High international leverage may also induce government elites to use expressions of support for LGBT rights to enhance their reputation internationally. Of the four countries that most clearly fit the backsliding-plus-backlash category—Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia—only Serbia experienced high international leverage, since it is still applying for EU membership. Thus, the findings regarding gains to LGBT empowerment under backlash plus backsliding are highly dependent on the Serb case. ⁷⁸ A qualitative comparison of Hungary and Serbia, however, supports the argument that international leverage is critical (see below).

Looking qualitatively at the trajectories of four cases is helpful to unpack these quantitative findings (see Figure 5). My case-selection strategy is two-fold. First, I hold international leverage constant while varying the configurations of backsliding and backlash by comparing the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary after EU membership. This combination illustrates how the joint occurrence of backsliding with backlash threatens LGBT empowerment. Second, I allow international leverage to vary and hold domestic politics constant by comparing EU-member Hungary and EU-applicant Serbia under backsliding with backlash. This comparison highlights how the joint impact of backsliding and backlash depends on international leverage.

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Figure 5

LGBT empowerment trends in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia

Slovakia exemplifies a post-Communist country that has avoided the extremes of democratic backsliding and full-on political backlash but, by the same token, is hardly considered to have ideal conditions for LGBT empowerment. Social attitudes regarding gender and sexuality are generally conservative, and church authorities are relatively influential in politics. ⁷⁹ Conservatives have opposed expanding LGBT rights, but the government’s coalitional dynamics have always constrained the threat posed by such actors. Moreover, democratic institutions have offered rights advocates space to mobilize and expand their sphere of allies. In the process, rights advocates have benefited from EU support although EU leverage weakened after the country’s accession in 2004. It is a trajectory that Petra Guasti and Lenka Buštíková characterize as “limited accommodation” with LGBT empowerment. ⁸⁰ As Figure 5 illustrates, it has led to an overall improvement in the status of LGBT persons over time, albeit slowly and subject to occasional setbacks.

Advocacy for LGBT empowerment was slow to emerge in Slovakia in the 1990s, especially in comparison with the neighboring Czech Republic. ⁸¹ Advocacy groups were fragmented and not visible politically. EU accession improved their situation and allowed for the adoption of antidiscrimination provisions in the labor code, but this was the bare minimum required for membership. ⁸² In the first decade of the twenty-first century, rights advocates became more unified, as a central organization, and the Otherness Initiative (Iniciatíva Inakosť) was established; however, its attempts to expand legal protections—and, especially, to enact same-sex registered partnerships—were consistently obstructed by the Christian Democratic Movement (Kresťanskodemokratické hnutie, KDH). The Otherness Initiative did make strides in expanding public recognition of LGBT people compared with the pre-accession period, organizing annual film festivals and Pride parades from 2007 and 2013, respectively. In 2008, antidiscrimination provisions were extended to the provision of goods and services. ⁸³ As John Gould explains, conservatives have attempted to push back LGBT empowerment repeatedly since EU accession. ⁸⁴ At the same time, LGBT advocates have gradually expanded their circle of friends in parliament and the presidency. The result has been strong mobilization for and against expanding LGBT empowerment. Between 1997 and 2018, four bills for registered partnerships were introduced in parliament, but all failed. In 2015, KDH initiated a constitutional amendment to define marriage “heterosexually,” but it failed in a public referendum. Smaller victories have been won, such as legal recognition for same-sex cohabitation in 2017 and hate speech legislation in 2018. ⁸⁵ In summary, Slovakia’s LGBT minority faces attacks from conservative opponents, but it also makes use of the opportunities offered by democratic institutions and the rule of law to push back and incrementally expand sexual citizenship.

Turning to the Czech Republic, since 2010, the country has seen gradual but cumulatively significant democratic backsliding. As Seán Hanley and Milada Vachudova show, this backsliding differs from the nationalist-conservative variety evident in Hungary, Serbia, or Poland; instead of undermining democracy by attacking courts, undermining electoral competition, or restricting civil society, it operates through the concentration of state-administrative, economic, and media power in the hands of an oligarch-led party, the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (Akce nespokojených občanů, ANO). ⁸⁶ ANO is considered populist and anti-immigrant but is too ideologically flexible to be classified as conservative. Thus, the Czech case offers studies of the trajectories of LGBT empowerment both under democratizing centrist governments before 2010 and under backsliding but not under hard-right governments since. Before comparing the periods, I note that Figure 5 suggests no reversals in empowerment under the backsliding-without-backlash scenario.

The political-cultural and socio-attitudinal environment for LGBT empowerment is, by regional standards, comparatively favorable in the Czech Republic. ⁸⁷ From the 1990s through the mid-2000s, Czech LGBT activists built a well-organized and influential social movement, if also one that favored elite-based pragmatic advocacy over participatory or disruptive tactics. Over time, it became focused on enacting same-sex registered partnerships, patiently lobbying on behalf of four separate parliamentary proposals in 1998, 1999, 2001, and 2005 before achieving success. Having achieved registered partnerships—and becoming one of only two post-Communist countries at the time to do so—all of the movement’s major organizations subsequently disbanded: in the words of one leader, the movement’s mission was now to “maintain what has been achieved.” ⁸⁸

Since 2010, LGBT advocates have sought to re-establish the movement even as the country’s democracy has slowly eroded. However, it is striking to note in a recent survey of the Czech movement by Zdeněk Sloboda, who founded one of these second-generation organizations (PROUD) in 2010, that no connection is drawn between PROUD’s founding (or any of the others, e.g., Prague Pride, Galibi, Charlie, Jsme fér) and threats to democracy. ⁸⁹ Instead the new wave of activism is addressed at correcting the shortcomings in the registered partnerships law and, more ambitiously, enacting same-sex marriage. As with the campaign for registered partnerships, favorable public opinion has not allowed the movement to overcome legislative obstacles in a fragmented parliament, at least thus far. ⁹⁰ Failure to achieve legislative goals is not the result of constraints on civil society or hostile political backlash, but it has led to a “mild decline” in the robustness of the Czech movement. ⁹¹ Interestingly, Sloboda suggests that “One of the reasons for such development is that Czech society lacked (and still lacks) a hostile opposition to LGBT+ people and their rights . . . [t]herefore, no radical, mass-organized LGBT+ movement has been necessary yet.” ⁹²

I turn now to Hungary and Serbia, two cases where this kind of hostile opposition has been present and has broken through to government power. Hungary exemplifies the effects of backlash combined with backsliding under weak international leverage. Compared against other ECE countries, Hungary’s LGBT minority was well-situated before 2010. ⁹³ It had an organized and longstanding rights organization, Hátter. It also benefited from favorable court decisions on same-sex cohabitation and anti-discrimination policy in the 1990s. In the mid-2000s, prominent national parties, notably the Socialists and the Liberals, supported same-sex partnerships. In 2009, registered partnerships became law, making Hungary one of the few post-Communist countries with such legislation. The political tide turned, however, in 2010, when the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party won a constitutional supermajority. The party has subsequently locked in its dominance through changes to the constitution, court-packing, restrictions on the media and universities, and attacks on civil society. ⁹⁴ The regime is now classified as electoral-authoritarian. ⁹⁵ EU leverage has proved ineffective against backsliding. Not only did leverage weaken with Hungary’s accession in 2004, Daniel Kelemen argues that EU leverage has been especially weak in Hungary because of Fidesz’s ties with EU-level actors such as the European People’s Party, which have frustrated efforts to sanction the government for violating EU norms. ⁹⁶

Besides degrading the institutional climate within which civil societal groups can defend rights and advance their interests, the Fidesz government’s policies have affected LGBT empowerment more directly. As Fernando Nuñez-Mietz argues, Fidesz’s harassment of civil society groups with international funding was particularly conspicuous regarding LGBT-rights groups, “framing them as ‘EU agents’ working against the interests of the nation.” ⁹⁷ In 2011, Fidesz passed the Family Protection Act, which undermined same-sex partnerships by constitutionally defining marriage in “heterosexual” terms. Invoking the specter of demographic doom, the Hungarian right valorized the family, promoting natalist policies and portraying homosexuality as a threat to the reproduction of the nation. ⁹⁸ Fidesz proclaimed 2018 the “year of families,” banned gender studies programs, and promoted anti-gender campaigns as state policy. ⁹⁹ While some even harsher homophobic policies proposed by the right did not come to pass, it is clear that the political status of Hungary’s LGBT citizens has significantly retrenched under the combination of democratic backsliding and political backlash (see Figure 5). ¹⁰⁰

Compared with the other case studies, Serbia is a late democratizer, passing the threshold of electoral democracy only in 2001, following the ouster of Slobodan Milošević. The legacy of the Yugoslav civil war cast a long shadow over LGBT empowerment: during the war itself, a hyper-masculinized framing of Serb nationalism fueled pervasive state homophobia. ¹⁰¹ Later, this stigmatization was incorporated into the anti-Milošević pro-democracy movement, as it sought to immunize itself against enthno-nationalists’ identification of LGBT rights with a Western cabal against Serbia. The embodiment of this cabal was the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which sought to prosecute war crimes. Refusal to cooperate with the ICTY shut off any prospect of EU accession. In the early democratizing stage (2001–2008), the post-Milošević governments met this article’s criteria for political backlash from 2004 through 2008. Although John Gould and Edward Moe note limited LGBT activism in this period, ¹⁰² the most visible developments were a ban on same-sex marriage in 2006, violence at Pride parades in 2001 (the so-called “Massacre Pride”) and 2010, and a string of Prides canceled in the intervening years due to threats of violence. ¹⁰³

In 2008, the European Union signed a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Serbia, which credibly committed the European Union to a path for Serb membership and, thereby, greatly increased EU leverage. As Gould and Moe write of Serb politics since this turning point, “However homophobic they remain, Serbia’s political elite now appears committed to a European future that cannot be realized without protection of the rights of sexual minorities.” ¹⁰⁴ Since 2010, however, the country has experienced a broader erosion of democratic institutions, according to V-Dem’s indicators. Presiding over this democratic backsliding is the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which, its name notwithstanding, has far-right origins and manages a difficult balancing act between conservative and pro-EU/neoliberal factions. Since 2012, it has led coalitions containing the far-right New Serbia party, the Serbian People’s Party, and the Serbian Patriotic Alliance, meeting this paper’s criteria for backlash.

The combination of backsliding and backlash would seem greatly to imperil LGBT empowerment, until we consider the elites’, and especially the SNS’s, overriding concern with EU accession. In recent years, the country has become a regional standout regarding LGBT issues, at least in terms of official discourse and the policy record (see Figure 5). Since 2008, Serbia has added anti-discrimination provisions to its labor code, enacted hate crime legislation, and appointed a Commissioner for the Protection of Equality. ¹⁰⁵ The same SNS that has presided over democratic backsliding appointed in 2017 an openly lesbian prime minister, Ana Brnabić, who with her partner gave birth to a son while in office. ILGA-Europe notes other signs of LGBT empowerment in Serbia, such as the enactment of the anti-discrimination law and the withdrawal of all textbooks with homophobic content. ¹⁰⁶ That said, city bans on Pride parades in 2011, 2012, and 2013 attest to the ongoing social marginalization of LGBT citizens. Observers have cast these developments in a skeptical light, arguing that SNS “handpicked Brnabić as part of a ‘tactical Europeanization’ strategy—a way to speak to the European Union’s self-proclaimed LGBT-friendly identity without engaging with LGBT issues domestically.” ¹⁰⁷ The area scholar Safia Swimelar mentions the term “pink-washing” to describe the SNS’s actions. ¹⁰⁸ Whether successfully or not, Serbia appears to be using highly visible concessions to the LGBT minority to distract international attention from its broader democratic failings.

Conclusion

If third-wave democratization expanded LGBTQIAP empowerment globally, do recent trends of democratic backsliding now threaten to set back that empowerment? I have argued that answering this question requires integrating insights from three literatures typically not integrated with each other: on democratization, on political backlash, and on international leverage. As a region that stands out globally in terms of backsliding, backlash in the form of electoral breakthroughs by hard-right political parties, and strong international leverage through EU accession politics, ECE lends itself to studying how these elements interact to shape the trajectory of sexual citizenship.

Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the following broader findings emerge. First, the ECE experience affirms Encarnación’s argument that democratization is associated with expanding LGBTQIAP empowerment. ¹⁰⁹ Furthermore, there is no strong evidence that, taken individually, democratic backsliding or political backlash necessarily threaten empowerment gains from third-wave democratization. If they occur simultaneously, however, the empirical findings suggest that third-wave gains are vulnerable to erosion: the quantitative analysis shows that the magnitude of losses associated with simultaneous backlash and backsliding is greater than that of gains associated with their absence—at least in countries not subject to international leverage regarding LGBTQIAP rights. This last caveat is crucial because it highlights the pivotal role of international leverage. As Serbia in particular shows, the greatest gains to LGBTQIAP empowerment in ECE have occurred when governments with a record of democratic backsliding and a reputation for extreme conservatism are trying to burnish their image in order to join the European Union. Some have termed such empowerment gains “pink-washing,” and time will tell whether they will be meaningful in the longer term; however, the apparent gains in such cases sharply contrast with the sometimes disappointing records of more democratic counterparts. Should Serbia’s EU accession prospects dim, the sharp erosion of LGBTQIAP empowerment in backsliding and backlashing Hungary offers a cautionary tale.

Stepping beyond the purview of ECE to address the prospects for LGBTQIAP empowerment after the third wave will require addressing the limitations of this study’s research design. First, research on this topic is limited by the availability of cross-national data; the V-Dem survey is an excellent resource, especially for identifying episodes of democratic backsliding, but a finer-grained, disaggregated measure of LGBTQIAP empowerment would greatly expand scholars’ analytical leverage. Second, identifying episodes of political backlash is complicated by the limited coverage of comparative data sets on parties such as ParlGov used here. ¹¹⁰ This article’s focus on ECE was advantageous for the purpose of theory-building as was, for this author, working with cases whose politics were familiar, but the relatively low number of observations limited the statistical analysis to correlational rather than causal relationships. Third, to return to the conceptualization and measurement of backlash, future research should consider additional indicators, especially ones tied less to parties and more to culture and norms: for example, shifts in the amount of homophobic speech on social media platforms or counts of violent incidents against LGBTQ+ individuals. While such indicators present practical and methodological difficulties of their own, they could offer a more nuanced gauge of the perceived threat to minority groups during moments of backlash—especially if combined with political-party-based indicators.

Finally, a caveat regarding external validity is that because of EU accession’s importance to domestic politics in ECE, this region is useful for identifying the role of international leverage in LGBTQIAP empowerment; however, it also means that we should be careful about generalizing beyond the region. The European Union’s degree of engagement with LGBTQIAP rights is exceptional for international organizations, as is its external leverage. ¹¹¹ The impact of international leverage will certainly be lower elsewhere. Notwithstanding these caveats, the findings here strongly suggest that the longer arc of LGBTQIAP empowerment will depend in no small part on global trends in democratic governance, party system development, and the commitment of international advocacy networks.