Partisan‐based affective polarization has been posited as a key explanation for citizens' tolerance towards democratic backsliding, with voters more likely to overlook democratic violations conducted by in‐party candidates. Our study theorizes and empirically explores the reverse perspective on this relationship: focusing on the role of the opposition, we submit that backsliding may crystallize an affective dislike among opposition supporters towards the governing party and its supporters that stems from a regime divide over democracy itself. To probe the plausibility of this argument, we leverage original survey data collected in Hungary, where democratic backsliding under the Fidesz government has resulted in an extensive remodelling of the political system since 2010. Our results point to a government–opposition divide in partisan affect and show how liberal democratic attitudes, especially among opposition party supporters, play into this dynamic. We suggest that where backsliding persists over a longer period, this process can shift even multi‐party systems towards increasing bipolarity along what we term a ‘democratic divide’. Ultimately, our study proposes a novel lens on the dynamics of democratic backsliding by suggesting that affective polarization may play a positive role in backsliding contexts by uniting the opposition around the defence of democracy. Our findings point to a number of future research avenues to further analyse the interactive relationship between democratic backsliding and affective polarization.

This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region’s widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today in order to (2) outline its implications for the study of post-state-socialist nonprofits. Most of the empirical examples come from Hungary. These examples serve illustrative purposes and are intended as devices to provoke new analysis. They are meant to open, rather than close, discussion.

This article discusses the challenges of moving towards student-centredness in East-Central Europe through the example of Hungary’s subject-focused academic culture and the (re-)design of a political science research methods course at the University of Szeged for Spring 2012. Although countries participating in the Bologna Process undersigned the importance of student-centredness, few countries have actually yet moved in this direction. In addition, we know very little about how these instructional methods work outside the Western democratic context. I show that research into teaching is an important means to improve the process of education and that there are specific problems in transferring student-centredness into post-Communist higher education settings. Finally, I argue that knowing one’s teaching context is vital for planning student-centred courses effectively, which would be greatly fostered by experiencing other teaching contexts through early-career teacher exchanges. The European Commission has recently affirmed its commitment to staff exchanges, but such opportunities are only likely to be beneficial if they go beyond the current 6-week long exchange scheme that the Erasmus programme offers.

The article investigates the intellectual foundations of the political projects led by Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán. We demonstrate that next to homegrown populist and traditionalist ideas, the radicalisation of conservative thought in the West, particularly in the USA, facilitated the illiberal turn of these two countries during the 2010s. The state-, nation- and family-centred narratives, born out of this West–East cross-fertilisation, were then re-exported abroad with considerable financial support from the countries’ respective governments. The collaboration of politicians and intellectuals, and the tolerance within the circle of the critics of liberal democracy, appear as important factors behind their success. The regimes led by PiS and Fidesz provided Western conservatives with a “proof-of-concept”, demonstrating the viability of their ideas and emboldening them to further challenge the liberal consensus.

Hungary and Poland are often placed in the same analytical framework from the period of their ‘negotiated revolutions’ to their autocratic turn. This article aims to look behind this apparent similarity focusing on opposition behaviour. The analysis demonstrates that the executive–parliament power structure, the vigour of the extra-parliamentary actors, and the opposition party frame have the strongest influence on opposition behaviour, and they provide the sources of difference between the two country cases: in Hungary an enforced power game and in Poland a political game constrain opposition opportunities and opposition strategic behaviour.

Academic freedom is intrinsically linked to the rule of law and fundamental rights, most notably, the freedom of sciences and free speech in general. Academic freedom has been constitutionally embedded in Hungary since the democratic transition. After a series of laws and policies eliminating government criticism and effective checks on those in power for many years, on 4 April 2017 the Hungarian Parliament finally targeted academic freedom as well, and in this vein, adopted a modification to the Act on National Higher Education. The thinly veiled objective behind the legislation is to force Budapest-based and US-accredited Central European University (CEU) out of the country. CEU was founded by Mr George Soros, public enemy number one in the eyes of the rulers of today’s Hungary. The election campaign before the 2018 parliamentary elections is framed around a government initiative entitled “Stop Soros”, harassing organizations receiving Soros money. CEU and Soros-funded NGOs represent everything the government fights against or is suspicious of, such as the rule of law, fundamental rights, multiculturalism, tolerance, accountable government, transparency, justice, equality, liberal democracy, and open society. The modification of the Act on National Higher Education fits into a broader picture of a state in constitutional capture, where fundamental rights in general are in jeopardy. This article explains the broader problem of rule of law backsliding; it assesses the controversial law curbing academic freedom, highlights its bias nature targeting CEU and CEU only, and draws up future scenarios in light of possible national and international responses.

This research note addresses issues, concerns, and opportunities for teachers and researchers of the third sector in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on experiences in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. The paper briefly outlines the development of the third sector in the aforementioned countries, and describes the current state of third sector teaching and research there. It then frames the challenges for the region’s teachers and researchers, and proposes an appropriate role for the West, commenting upon the West’s relevance within Central and Eastern Europe.

While the stability of legislation is one of the fundamental issues in political theory, comparative and quantitative analyses on the subject are in short supply in the political science literature. In this article, we propose a novel measurement scheme for legislative stability, and we also introduce a Legislative Stability Index (LSI) developed to this end. In terms of empirical evidence, our index relies on the number of legislative amendments adopted within the span of an electoral cycle, as well as the breadth of issues the amendments touch on. It is based on the frequency with which laws are amended after their adoption. Our approach uses a new law-amendment edge-type network for a new Hungarian legislative database. Amendment-type connections are discovered by an automated dictionary-based text mining method. We tested the applicability of our index in various regression models. Results show that the legislative term, the length of the law and the way it was adopted were the most significant variables in explaining variation in the stability of legislation.

Socialist democracy appeared in the theory of democracy as an eminently non-western form of democracy in the period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The concept of socialist democracy based on the theses that can differentiate socialist democracy from liberal or parliamentarian democracy: (1) the unity of the power of the proletariat, led by its vanguard political force of the communists, and (2) the setting of the framework of democratic decision-making in the field of labor. Socialist democracy was indeed a form of directed democracy beyond that it had systemic aspirations to create an alternative socio-economic model. This article aims to trace the historical-semantic formation of socialist democracy and discuss its main institutions in the years of post-totalitarian socialist Hungary between 1956 and 1989. What is remarkable in the case of Hungary is that the development of socialist democracy was accompanied by economic reforms to the planned economy from the first half of the 1960s. Thus, socialist democracy focused on the democratization and institutional system of the workplace, mainly as factory democracy and cooperative democracy. With the liberalization and capitalization of socialist economy in the eighties, however, these forms failed to manage the problems of economic incentives and social atomization.

Much has been written over the past decade about the rise and success of far-right parties as key actors of dissensus over liberal democracy. Less attention, however, has been devoted to similar transformations taking place within civil society. This article examines the role played by think tanks in Poland and Hungary in building a new illiberal field. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, we theorize four core functions performed by illiberal think tanks: mediating, building, disseminating, and legitimizing this emerging field. Using Twitter data, we analyze how these illiberal think tanks operate as crucial nodes in connecting national, European, and American intellectuals and actors. Through their work and accumulation of cultural and academic capital, they contribute to fostering dissensus over liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

Despite the fact that Hungary was less affected by the 2015 migration crisis in objective terms—i.e. the negligible number of immigrants entering and settling in the country in the last years-, the Hungarian government has been pushing an extreme anti-immigration political communication since 2015, which resulted in an intensive and highly politicised public discourse about immigration. This analysis aims at exploring the involvement of political scientists in the online public discourse about the migration and refugee crisis in Hungary between 2015 and 2019. In contrast with other countries, where high salient political crises have stimulated political scientists’ public engagement, this analysis finds that such participation does not apply to the Hungarian case. The low visibility of political scientists is accompanied by the adoption among participants in news portals of either a partisan, pro-government stance or a neutral approach to the issue, while critical positions with the government are almost inexistent. These patterns suggest the influence of both the illiberal institutional turn of the Hungarian media environment and the decrease in academic freedom in the country, as factors deterring public engagement among political scientists in the immigration issue, particularly of those who could adopt a critical position.

In this article, we explore the ways in which partnerships with the state within state-led developmental programs might effect the autonomy of civic organizations (COs) and their readiness to enter in political action. To identify the relationship between collaboration with the state and civic autonomy we draw on data from a survey of 740 Hungarian regional civic associations. We did not find support for the theses that mixing with the state might undermine the autonomy of COs and lead to their political neutralization. Also, we did not find support for the hypotheses that political action is solely about money or it is the property of non-autonomous NGOs. We have identified several mechanisms that allow COs to combine participation in partnership projects with maintained autonomy and political activism.