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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.

• About the ideological dimensions of fear

  74-111

  Beáta Kovács

  Views:

  80

  The main goal of of my research is to explore the right and left dimensions of the phenomenon of fear. I would like to argue that the categories of left and right continue to be defining aspects of political identities, and by mapping their emotional structure we can better understand the current relevance of these ideologies. The studies that have examined political fears have mostly linked fear to conservativism and right wing-populism, while the fears of the left have generated far less scientific interest. A study also wants to respond to this research gap. In this paper, I would like to present the potential connection points between fear and ideological identity. The structure of the study is as follows: first, I outline the relationship between ideology and moral emotions, and then I analyze fear as a moral emotion. After that I present how fear is connected to conservatism and right-wing populism, and then I try to illustrate the ideological differences with two types of politically relevant fear, i.e. climate anxiety and migration-related fear. Finally, I add context to these specific political fears that is I also interpret them in the Hungarian political system. The study ends with drawing conclusions and outlining future research directions.

• Exploring the possible expressions of social dominance in an online context: Discourse analysis below the video contents of the representatives of Finn’s Party

  1-24

  Márton Markovics

  Views:

  19

  In the course of the study, discourse analysis was used to examine the comments posted under the videos of three representatives of the Finns Party with the largest YouTube following. The aim of the research was to identify discoursive manifestations of social dominance in the comment field. In addition, we also aimed to validate a word list of socially dominant terms. To this end, we have identified four linguistic categories that could form the basis of socially dominant communication, based on the literature of social dominance. The words with the highest number of elements in each category were presented in a word cloud. After collecting the most frequent terms, three external groups were identified against which social dominance orientation may be relevant. These suggest that the European Union, immigrants and the domestic left may constitute the out-group category in the eyes of populist supporters. Finally, the hierarchical terms were not validated as they occured in a negligible number of items in the sample. The successfully validated categories were plotted on a cross-tabulation, from which we created four different types of Finns Party supporters based on the out-group they named and the dominant common words and phrases in the comment categories. The presence of authoritarian, political out-group category points to the spread of political polarization in Finland. Since social identity underlies both social dominance orientation and political polarization, it may be relevant to examine both together in future research. Nonetheless, social dominance was not expressed in the way that was initially assumed and commentators perceived “real Finns” as the sufferers of a socially dominant situation. The background to this phenomenon is presumably the populist political rhetoric of the Finns’ Party, which tries to portray Finns as people left behind in disadvantaged social positions.