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The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale “punctuations”. Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities. However, based on our results, illiberal political systems, such as the hybrid regime of Viktor Orbán, are difficult to pin down on such a clear-cut continuum between democracy and autocracy as the level of punctuation differs by policy agendas from parliamentary debates to budgets.

Since 2010, Hungary's public discourse has often been seen as the recurring topic Fidesz, a party alliance elected with a qualified majority, actually implementing the programme of Jobbik, a radical right-wing opposition party. Analysing the electoral manifestos of the two parties, our paper investigates which party's agenda has more similarities to the legislative agenda of the 2010-2014 term as well as what strategies Fidesz applied to neutralise Jobbik's key election pledges. We concluded that the idea stating the Fidesz fulfils the Jobbik's policy programme should be shaded, we found partial influence of Jobbik on Fidesz. The agenda-setting ability of the latter seems quite strong. If we analyse it by pledge fulfilment, we can see that Fidesz reflected to the overwhelming majority of Jobbik's key pledges. However, we experienced, that policy shifts were quite rare among these cases.

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