Local-Level Democratic Backsliding? The Consolidation of Aspiring Dominant-Party Regimes in Hungary and Poland

Abstract

Aspiring dominant-party regimes often institute major institutional and political reforms at the national level to ensure they retain control. However, subnational politics is an important, under-studied, component of regime consolidation. This study uses mayoral races in Hungary and Poland from 2006 to 2018 to examine two factors that may inhibit dominant-party regime consolidation in local politics: the use of two-round, i.e. runoff, electoral systems and strategic coordination among opposition parties. While we find little evidence that strategic coordination can lead to widespread opposition success in single-round systems, we do find that increasing the number of candidates decreases the likelihood of the nationally dominant party winning in the first round while not affecting the second round. As such, two-round mayoral elections may be an important buffer to dominant-party regime consolidation and may provide a training ground for the future opposition.

When do Local Governments Discriminate? Lessons from the Spread of “LGBT Free Zones” in Poland

“…Two features of the post-2015 climate lead us to characterize it as a qualitatively new stage in this evolution: its strongly subnational dynamics and its coincidence with democratic backsliding. Since 2015, Poland's democratic institutions have deteriorated sharply, making it one of the leading examples of democratic backsliding in the region (Kelemen 2017;Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018;O'Dwyer and Stenberg 2022;Pirro and Stanley 2022). Thus, the context in which socially conservative backlash is occurring now is significantly different than in the 1990s, when the country's democratic institutions were not under threat.…”

The End of History in EU Law and Politics? Challenging Founding Narratives with a New Research Agenda

“…variation for less than 1.7% of the data). These data even fail to capture temporal changes for Hungary and Poland -the world's fastest autocratizing states (VDem 2022), whose public administrations have been politically co-opted, packed with partisan loyalists, and instructed to flout their constitutional and EU legal obligations since Fidesz assumed power in Hungary in 2010 and PiS in Poland in 2015 (Pech & Scheppele 2017;Scheppele 2018;Sadurski 2019;O'Dwyer and Stenberg 2022). That these two states -which have been plagued by widely-publicized and full-fledged "constitutional breakdowns," massive increases in public corruption, and described as "mafia states" (Magyar 2016) -would not register any change in the ICRG's bureaucratic quality scores is a glaring red flag as to their quality and ability to proxy for states' compliance capacity.…”

Citizens as a Democratic Safeguard? The Sequence of Sanctioning Elite Attacks on Democracy

“…have become a realistic scenario in Polish politics (O'Dwyer and Stenberg 2021). And yet, so far, electoral institutions such as the National Electoral Commission (Państwowa Komisja Wyborcza) have not been subject to the governing party's attempts to weaken democratic institutions.…”