Illiberal Democracy Archives

Feature

How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

An interview with Kim Lane Scheppele and Daniel Hegedűs

January 27, 2019 • by Daniel Hegedűs, Kim Lane Scheppele and Krisztian Simon

The Hungarian regime has a wide range of tools to repress its people and it deploys them cleverly to avoid drawing too much criticism at home and abroad. The Green European Journal spoke with Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University and political scientist Daniel Hegedűs about Hungary’s autocratic turn ...

How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

Blue Monday

Thinking Politically in the Age of Trump

Introduction to #AgainstTrump: Notes from Year One

June 11, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

A note from the author: This seems like a good time to follow up Jeffrey Goldfarb’s column of last week by posting the Introduction to my new Public Seminar book, #AgainstTrump: Notes from Year One, which is available from Public Seminar as a free download here. "I merely took the energy it takes to pout, ...

Thinking Politically in the Age of Trump

Feature

The Radical Center and The Politics of the Gray

Notes on the implications of the social condition for an understanding of politics

March 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Over the past three months, I have been publishing weekly Gray Friday posts, reflecting on the events of the day and enduring human problems, and considering how contributions to Public Seminar inform my appreciation of the beauty of the gray. Today, I will begin to explain the political implications I ...

The Radical Center and The Politics of the Gray

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Feature

Nowhere is Somewhere

Solidarity and the space between nations

January 15, 2018 • by Siobhan Kattago

Since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, there has been a distinct shift away from a liberal international order based on supranational organizations supporting human rights, freedom and equality towards the primacy of the nation-state. Moreover, sentiments of fear and resentment ...

Feature

Illiberal Democracy and Conceptual Clarity

Report from a Debate

August 4, 2017 • by Ewa Atanassow

This piece is part of the discussion generated by Jeffrey C. Isaac’s piece, Illiberal Democracy. This May 8 in Berlin -- a date and place whose symbolism cannot be mistaken -- the Hertie School of Governance launched the 2017 issue of the Governance Report. This year’s issue is devoted to the topic of ...

Democracy

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Reflections on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

August 2, 2017 • by András Bozóki

Since the end of the “transition paradigm”[i] which displayed an optimistic belief in political progress, analysts had to accept that the development from dictatorship to democracy could be halted or reversed. General expectations notwithstanding, the democratic upheaval of 1989-1991 did not end in turning all dictatorships into liberal democracies. Not ...

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Feature

Taking “Illiberal Democracy” Seriously

Responding to Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

July 21, 2017 • by Jan-Werner Mueller

This piece is part of the discussion generated by Jeffrey C. Isaac’s piece, Illiberal Democracy. Jeffrey Isaac wants us to take seriously “illiberal democracy” both as an idea and as a political reality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is indeed important to understand the challenges posed by political leaders ...

Feature

Illiberal Democracy, CEU, and the Frog

Responding to Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

July 17, 2017 • by Eva Fodor

This piece is part of the discussion generated by Jeffrey C. Isaac's piece, Illiberal Democracy. As I was taking the escalator up in one of Budapest’s most central subway stations on a sunny July day in 2017, I counted forty-eight advertising spaces along the walls. Of the 48, forty-seven carried one ...

Feature

Is There Illiberal Democracy?

A Problem with no Semantic Solution

July 12, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Editor's note: This is the introduction to an in depth essay on a major problem of our times, the international development of a form of authoritarianism that uses the rhetoric of democracy. The full essay can be found here. This then will be followed with a series of commentaries, opening a new ...

Feature

The Illiberal International

September 14, 2016 • by Sławomir Sierakowski

Stalin, in the first decade of Soviet power, backed the idea of “socialism in one country,” meaning that, until conditions ripened, socialism was for the USSR alone. When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared, in July 2014, his intention to build an “illiberal democracy,” it was widely assumed that he ...