Abstract
Our global political arena has undergone some serious changes in the past few decades. We have seen the rise of several political actors who did not fit in the previously dominant paradigm of liberal democracy, challenging our thoughts, sometimes of democracy itself. As a reaction to these, plenty of scientific articles have been written under the labels of “populism,” “democratic backlash”—and its different synonyms, the birth of “hybrid regimes” or “semi-dictatorships” and so on. These labels have all tried to reflect on these changes from the perspective of liberal democracy, assessing contemporary regimes based on how liberal and democratic they are on a one-dimensional linear scale. As these labels have failed to explain the aforementioned phenomena fully, the authors offer the new theoretical model of “plebiscitary leader democracy” (PLD), building on the work of Max Weber. They use the illustrative case of Hungary and Viktor Orbán to present their theory, which—unlike other approaches—considers both discursive and structural elements.
The Orbán regime’s analysis begins in 2010. After introducing the concept and analytical framework of PLD, the authors proceed to introduce the Orbán regime itself: its pre-history, context, and politics. They continue with presenting the structural elements: how the regime has rebuilt the polity by constitutional tinkering and institutional reorganization and how they abuse public policy by clientelist etatism, selective responsiveness, and ideological bricolage. Despite Viktor Orbán being the country’s prime minister between 1998 and 2002, labeling him as an illustration of populism, illiberalism, and a drift toward authoritarianism only appeared after he took power for the second time in 2010. Since then, Hungarian politics have often been at the center of attention in the media and academia. The two most prominent existing explanations regarding Hungarian politics have been populism and “the regime classification paradigm.” In the case of the populism approach, populism is usually perceived as ideology or discourse, overall leaving structural, regime-level elements without explanation and disregarding the transformation of democracy. Furthermore, as the authors argue, mainstream populism literature does not consider that populism emerged as a polar opposite to technocratic politics, making them unable to understand the essence of Hungarian politics and leaving us with only partial explanations. The proponents of the other approach, the regime classification paradigm, have labeled post-2010 Hungary as a country experiencing a democratic backslide currently being between democracy and authoritarianism. The starting point of this hybrid regime literature is the ideal of liberal democracy: it compares actual regimes with liberal democratic standards. Therefore, its focus is on the lack of some features rather than on existing characteristics, leaving out potential endogenous explanations and broader political trends.
In contrast to these mainstream interpretations, the authors of this book propose “plebiscitary leader democracy” (PLD) as an alternative analytical approach for understanding Hungarian politics. As defined by them, a PLD is a political regime that relies on charismatic legitimacy and contains personalist, authoritarian and democratic features as well. While considering the previously mentioned approaches, they try to provide a broader perspective by considering current political trends, such as the diminishing role of parties, mediatization, or personalization—which altogether have undermined the previously dominant party democracy. The ideal-type concept of PLD can be best understood as a political regime characterized foremost by the personalization and leader-centeredness of politics. Leaders fulfill a special role: they do not only shape the political preferences of voters but the political process as well. As leaders define politics, democracy is only present at its bare minimum, as an approval of the incumbents, being far from liberal-democratic ideals. The most important achievement of the book is perhaps that it provides a realist assessment of contemporary politics and highlights how contemporary political trends can eventually lead to a different type of political authority by changing the nature of democracy. Thus, it contributes to realist democratic theory as well, which could be better emphasized.
Although the book builds on the case of Hungary, it puts forward a conceptual framework that can be used to understand broader contemporary political trends. As argued, Hungary is an experimental laboratory for PLD, but its analysis goes beyond itself, as it carries the possibility of providing a better understanding of contemporary political tendencies. The new conceptual framework that the authors propose provides a refreshing novelty compared with existing scholarly literature, which often repeats the same concepts over and over again (let us just think about the abundance of populism literature or the several approaches to democratic backsliding). The PLD model that the authors suggest provides an entirely novel insight into contemporary political trends. Its universal applicability makes it suitable for investigation in other political contexts, carrying the possibility of the PLD becoming a prominent realist analytical approach for understanding contemporary politics.
