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• Trojan horse and fig leaf: the role of populism in the global crisis of democracy and the postmodern autocracies

  30-61

  István Benedek

  Views:

  72

  It 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.

• Hybrid regimes and the grey zone: new answers to fundamental problems in the study of political regimes

  42-59

  Attila Gyulai

  Juliane Stein-Zalai

  Views:

  72

  Contrary to widely held expectations, the third wave of democratization has brought about not
  only democracy but also the emergence of many regimes of whichtraditional democratic theory
  cannot make sense. The overwhelmingly dichotomous, teleological, and minimalist approaches
  fail to adequately describe political regimes in the grey zone between outright autocracy and
  full-fledged democracy. In our essay, we discuss the theoretical approaches that aim to grasp
  what has been increasingly called hybrid regimes, namely political regimes that combine
  autoritharian and democratic elements. We point to the theoretical and empirical limitations
  of these efforts and argue that the concept of hybrid regimes is still inextricably linked with the
  concept of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, even if the existing approaches to hybrid regimes
  suffer from a series of shortcomings, by providing fine-grained and more realistic descriptions of regime transformations, they make an important contribution to the literature on political
  regimes.

• Competitive elections and the challenges of the concept of competitiveness

  37-52

  Anna Unger

  Views:

  136

  The paper relates to the literature on contemporary non-democratic systems with multi-party elections. It aims to prove that electoral competitiveness is a key concept for understanding these systems, but this concept is currently underdeveloped. It first reviews the main approaches of competition and competitiveness, then, using the widely accepted type of competitive authoritarian hybrid regime, argues that the concept developed by its inventors does not provide sufficient support to detect competitiveness, because the factor of uncertainty used by the concept creators to justify its existence is not accompanied by any real indicators. The conclusion of the article is that competitiveness should therefore be derived not from the unidentifiable uncertainty factor, but from the concept of electoral integrity, which indicates the existence or the absence of genuine (competitive) elections, and from the concept and characteristics of electoral manipulations.