The Political Nature of Ideological Polarization: The Case of Hungary

Abstract

Polarization in Hungary is one of the most severe cases in Europe. It is predominantly elite-driven, and determined mostly by the antagonistic confrontation between the parties. Left and Right blocs oppose each other in a struggle where the loser is completely denied any influence on policymaking. The two blocs endorse opposing views on socio-cultural policies, but this division emerged as a consequence of the rhetoric and coalitional choices of parties, more than from the societal divisions that they ostensibly represent. Moreover, while the perceived ideological distance between party blocs is wide, the actual programmatic differences in the parties’ economic and social policy stances are modest. This article draws on a broad range of sources to describe the process of polarization in Hungary after the fall of communism. I discuss how a polarizing style of political competition can lead to a politically divided society and, over the long run, to democratic erosion.

Setting the record straight: System justification and rigidity‐of‐the‐right in contemporary Hungarian politics

“…Other Hungarian parties in opposition to Fidesz—including liberal‐democrats, socialists and Green activists—are widely regarded as weak, disorganised, and ineffective . Their role in Hungarian political life is largely confined to the nation's capital, Budapest, and is therefore rather minimal at the present time, although left–right polarisation throughout the country is very high by European standards (Vegetti, ).…”

Democratic backsliding in the European Union: the role of the Hungarian-Polish coalition

“…Accordingly, studies on democratic backsliding in the two countries have placed particular emphasis on the agency, ambitions and ideology of political leadership (Greskovits 2015;Sadurski 2018) as well as the broader patterns of political competition (Vegetti 2019). Other factors, such as the failure of competing mainstream parties to meaningfully respond to the demands of increasingly disenchanted electorates (Grzymala-Busse 2019) or the politically motivated manipulation of mass media (Krekó and Enyedi 2018; Surowiec and Štětka 2020) have also been examined.…”

“…Most of the studies examining backsliding focus on endogenous explanatory factors, e.g. political ideology, patterns of competition or state capture by elite coalitions (Greskovits 2015;Sadurski 2018;Dimitrova 2018;Vegetti 2019) or, alternatively, on the role of the EU, asking whether it has prevented or, conversely contributed to backsliding (Bozóki and Hegedűs 2018;Closa 2019;Halmai 2019;Kelemen 2017Kelemen , 2019Meijers and van der Veer 2019). We complement the existing accounts with an additional element: coalescence patterns of the political leadership orchestrating the backsliding.…”

Competition and interaction: Party ties to interest groups in a multidimensional policy space

“…In existing studies of polarisation on a general left‐right dimension, the measure is often weighted by the size of the parties to avoid disproportional influence by smaller parties with extreme positions (Dalton 2008; Vegetti 2019). Given our analytical unit (party–group category pairings) and multiple policy dimensions, a weighted measure makes less sense here.…”