Abstract
ABSTRACT Central and Eastern Europe is the last world region to transition towards democracy. Today, it shows alarming signs of de-consolidation, most prominently in Hungary, Poland, and Serbia. This article assesses whether these observations form part of a systematic pattern across the region. It relies on newly-updated objective data from the Democracy Barometer for the period between 1990 and 2016. It revisits evidence for the three most prominent explanations of democratic backsliding in the region: the rise of populist parties, the incapacity of the European Union to secure democracy once pre-accession incentives weaken, and the global financial crisis.
Highlights
Never before in history has a greater extent of the world been under democratic rule than today
We investigate three widely-cited explanations: first, the increasing role of anti-elite, populist parties in government; second, the European Union’s fatigue with efforts to sustain improvements in the quality of democracy once an applicant state has joined the Union; and, third, the financial crisis of 2008, which has deeply affected the economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries and which has had serious repercussions for their political systems, and for the capacity of the European Union and its democratic agenda
Our results indicate that the widespread public perception of a deep crisis of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe may be exaggerated
Summary
Never before in history has a greater extent of the world been under democratic rule than today. Our regional focus on Central and Eastern Europe offers three advantages: First, as earlier research has found important differences in the effect of populism on democracy between consolidated and weak democracies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012a, 18– 26, 2012b), the recent transition of the region towards democracy offers a set of similar cases for comparison It offers crucial variance for the most prominent explanations for the purported backsliding. We introduce the term “quality of democracy”, discussing both its conceptualisation and operationalisation with the newlyupdated Democracy Barometer dataset We use this dataset to empirically trace recent trends in the quality of democracy in all 19 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, identifying both countries displaying major transformations, as well as the democratic functions most strongly affected. We conclude and compare our findings to the results of expert-based assessments
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