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Neo-Hobbesian democracy: The theory of modus vivendi and democratic legitimacy
25-41Views:44In political theory, the criticism of Rawlsian constructivist liberalism has been articulated in
theories of political realism. John Gray, one of the promoters of realist liberalism, recommends
a neo-Hobbesian way of social coexistence which is based on the conflictual and antagonistic
idea of political life. It takes social values and forms of life as incommensurable in modern
multicultural societies. Taking value-pluralism and its conflicts seriously, a theory of modus
vivendi has been articulated among realist political thinkers. Being a post-liberal (or post-Enlightenment) theory, modus vivendi is more a practice oriented and open-ended theory than
philosophical constructions based on high morality. Modus vivendi theorists make an emphasis
on the peaceful co-existence of social groups and a moral minimum of the political society. One of
the deficiency of the theory is that it says not much about democracy, though it would be highly
useful according to two contextual considerations.On the one hand, a modern political system
would be impossible or outrageous without any form of democratic legitimacy. On the other
hand, there is an exhaustion of the liberal project(s) and the societies featured by multicultural
prosperity. Besides constitutional protection, defending democracy in this new context means
balancing between cultural and other value-oriented groups in modern societies. In my paper,
I make an attempt to examine the concept of democracy in the light of modus vivendi theory. -
Hybrid regimes and the grey zone: new answers to fundamental problems in the study of political regimes
42-59Views:72Contrary 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. -
Conflicts and democracy: Considerations on political conflicts and the need of their delimitation
8-24Views:51According to our common experience of political life, the relationship between politics and
conflicts seems to be obvious. However, it is also common to think about delimiting the intensity
of conflicts in a democratic context. This kind of complexity of the relation of democracy and
conflicts can be cexplained from two theoretical perspectives. First, in order to protect democratic
order, conflicts may lose their relevance in comparison to the value of consent or compromise. Second, even if we accept the importance of conflicts, we also should take into account the limits
of their intensity. These theoretical problems arise in the context of contemporary politics which
nature is eminently public and in which every announcement is open to discussion. This is what
discourse as a theoretical horizon means. The core concept for theorizing the conflictual character
of politics in a discursive manner is political debate. The article explores three kinds of debate
and communicative conflicts: John Stuart Mill, as a classical nineteenth century liberal, sheds
light on the importance of debate in issues of collective truth-seeking and emotional devotion
to our personal values. Márton Szabó, a leading theorist of political discourse in Hungary, also
treats debate as a core concept of political discourse studies, and theorizes debate not only as
a series of singular acts in the realm of politics, but as a mode of existence of politics itself.
Contrary to other contemporary ideas of communication and politics, discourse is therefore
inherently conflictual in its character. Similarly, but more embedded in contemporary debates
over democracy, Chantal Mouffe, one of the eminent theorists of agonism, interprets conflicts
in the context of democratic order, and emphasises the democratic conditions for constructing
democratic identities. Her ideas on agonistic democracy can fathom the relation of valuable
conflicts and their limits in a democratic regime. -
Political development: what, why, how? A comparative framework for Hungarian history
5-26Views:90The essay focuses on the comparative analysis of Hungarian political development before 1989–90. Instead of dealing with the 32 years since the change of regime, the author is interested in how many different interpretations of political development can be identified. The author singles out examples of political development in developed countries (for example the United States) as well as developing countries (those countries which have become decolonized in the 1960s). The starting point of the analysis is that Hungary cannot be described by either the categories used for developed countries or those that are used for developing ones. While the essay recognizes that the measure of progress at all times for Hungarian development is the example of Western development, it does not accept the approach according to which Hungarian development is a “dead-end” because it differs from Western development in many ways. The essay puts forward the hypothesis of the “normality” of Hungarian political development.
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The Effects of the 2011 Electoral Reform on the Results of the Hungarian Legislative Elections I. : Theoretical aspects of the reform
195-209Views:70The second wave of democracy after World Wa II, followed by the third wave in the 1970’s and
the 80’s – including the historic democratic transitions in Eastern Europe after the collapse
of the Soviet Empire – led to the expansion of democratic electoral systems around the world.
The design of electoral systems and of the undergoing electoral reforms has become a vital
component of the democratization process. The study of the theory and politics of electoral
reform led to the adoption of new theoretical and methodological approaches in order to cope
with the challenging phenomena.
The main goal of this paper is to interpret the concept of reform, and to unfold some of
theoretical aspects of it in order to identify some of the main components of the concept. With the theoretical approach we can get a better understandic of the reform itself, and we can
demonstrate that electoral reform is a complex process which should not be reduced to a simplistic
model in which a few actors driven by a few motives can fully explain the whole phenomenon.
The theoretical study of the reform can show that some politial events, the established party
system (first and foremost the distribution of power between the various parties), the type of the
actual electoral system (its advantages and disadvantages) as well as some contingents factors
must be taken into consideration in order to have a better understanding of the nature of the
political arena in which reform proposals are promoted and the reform itself takes place.
