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Election and Representation
8-38Views:172Whether we approach representation in a wider sense (philosophical) or in a narrower sense (political), the concept is – either way – polysemic, because its meaning is determined in many respects by many factors. Representation therefore should be delt with as a contested concept. Political representation – it turns out – is a modern concept, in which the particular but very complex relationship between the representative and represented has been brought in close relationship with such basic concepts as freedom, democracy, free elections and justice, whereas political representation had litte or nothing to do with these core values earlier. In spite of the pluralist interpretation of the concept, we can distinguish statistical and substantive political representation, the first referring to voters’ political preferences expressed in Parliamentary seats, while the substantive representation refers to the content of the governmental decisions in public affairs, with respect to social expectations. The purpose of this paper is to examine political representation through morphological method, for a better understanding of its inner structure and of the interdependency of its core elements.
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Presence and plebiscitary representation: Representative performances of Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar in the 2024 election campaign
39-67Views:276The study examines the interactions of meaning effects and presence effects in the mass events of Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar in the 2024 election campaign, attempting to show that the performances of both leaders can be interpreted as forms of plebiscitary representation, although there are also substantial differences between them (for example, in the degree of asymmetry of the representative relationship and the palette of leader-follower interactions). The text argues that such an analysis, blending traditional aspects of representational claims analysis with ethnographic method, can help to shed light on a blind spot in contemporary performative approaches to representation: the corporeal-material aspects of performativity. Plebiscitary representation, in which a unified mass acclaiming a leader plays a key role, is a particularly suitable context for demonstrating the importance of presence-effects in the constitutive process of representation.
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Synecdochal Representation and Transgressive Style: The Performative Turn of Populism Studies in the Case of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn
68-97Views:99The past decade has seen a proliferation of work on populism, a field generally dominated by the ideational approach of Cas Mudde, offering a conceptualization of populism as a substantive position, worldview, or set of ideas underpinning public policies. In contrast, this paper proposes an alternative framewrok and draws on performative theories to shed new light on understanding populist leadership. The performative school transcends the boundaries of political discourse to place its focus on the sociocultural and stylistic-aesthetic aspects of populism. Within this conceptual framework, the paper analyses the performances of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, respectively. Suited to empirically informed theorizing, the cases offer avenues to further develop the performative approach and to expose the limited explanatory power of the ideational paradigm. The paper’s contribution to the literature is twofold. It offers an explanation of the co-exsistence and hybridization of elitist and populist elements in the case of Boris Johnson, and highlights the need for distinguishing between populist and popular forms of representation in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, thus promoting conceptual refinement.
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Trojan horse and fig leaf: the role of populism in the global crisis of democracy and the postmodern autocracies
30-61Views:177It is my contention that populism could be an appropriate framework to understand and link the phenomena of global crisis of democracy and spread of postmodern autocracies. In order to substantiate this claim with the method of literature review, I have examined first the characteristics of these phenomena and then I have focused the nature of relationship between them, in particular with regard to the complex system of stability of new types of autocracies, in which, I think, populism playing a key role. Populism, understood it as an autocratic interpretation of democracy and representation, could be a particularly dangerous Trojan horse for democracy. Above all, because of its idea of a single, homogeneous and authentic people that can be genuinely represented only by populists, and because of this representative claim is a moralized form of antipluralism. In addition, populism is also an important feature of postmodern autocracies, especially of electoral autocracy. By means of populism, it is possible for these regimes to camouflage and even legitimise the autocratic trends and exercise of power, as well as the creation an uneven playing field for political contestation behind their formally multi-party elections and democratic façade. As a radical turn towards traditional forms of autocracies would be too expensive, postmodern autocrats need manipulated multi-party elections and other plebiscite techniques that could serve as quasi-democratic legitimation, as well as populism that could transform political contestation to a life-and-death struggle and, provides other important cognitive functions. Therefore, populist autocracy, as a paradigmatic type of postmodern autocracies, will remain with us for a long time, giving more and more tasks to researchers involved in them.
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The political representation of Hungary’s ethnic minorities in the context of voter turnouts in the local self-governmental elections and in the parliamentary elections
25-39Views:177The political representation of minorities within a nation-state is a task that has always posed a great challenge to countries with substantial ethnic minorities, since both the hardships of establishing an adequate legislative environment, both the sensitivity of the subject make it exceedingly difficult for the legislator to develop a sufficient system. The issue of the proper representation of those 13 recognised minorities that are considered constituent components ofthe state were part of Hungary’s political history since the regime change, and for a rather long period of time it seemed that the adequate solution for their political representation was the local governmental system of ethnic minorities. Since 2011 however, the electoral system makes it possible for ethnic minorities to be represented within the Hungarian Parliament as well, which raises the question of whether this will shift the attention of the affected minority groups from the local self-governments towards the parliamentary representation. In this paper, after reviewing the changes within the legislative environment and – in close connection with that – the problems surrounding the issue of political representation of ethnic minorities, I will attempt to answer this emerging question through a brief analyses based on the turnout-data regarding the 2014 and the 2019 elections local governmental elections.
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The European Parliamentary Election as Second-Order Election
29-51Views:190Elections are in fact specific mechanisms for aggregating political preferences of the majority of voters into one will, transforming votes into seats. This is the major role of any election, whether at local, parliamentary, or EU level. The elections of the members of the European Parliament by direct and universal suffrage started in 1979, with the proposal that the members of the EP to be elected in accordance with a uniform procedure in all EU countries. In pursuit of a uniform electoral procedure for all the member-countries meant that European elections must be based on the principle of proportional representation using either the list system or the STV system. However, it turned out, that some challenges and difficulties arose reaching agreement on common principles of all countries and on the harmonisation of national traditions. One of the consequences of the complex relationship between the national parliamentary and the EP elections is that the composition of the EP does not precisely reflect the actual balance of political forces in the European Community, because the national political systems actually decide most of what there is to be decided politically. The European elections turned out to be second-order elections as additional political events to national elections. The most important political issues thus are determined more by the domestic political cleavages, than by decisions originating in the European Community. The present paper analyses the interrelationship between the first-order national elections and the second-order European elections based more or less on the works of Reif–Schmitt (1980), Marsch (1998), Covař (2016) and others.
