Abstract
AbstractThe 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.
Highlights
During the past decades, punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has become one of the fastest developing subfield of policy studies (Weible 2014: 10), and a premier field of empirical studies concerning policy issue priorities
PET claims that it explains what separate theories of policy change on the one hand, and policy stability on the other hand cannot explain: policy dynamics (Baumgartner, Jones, and Mortensen 2014: 59)
We investigate the core hypotheses of PET research in the context of a CEE country (Hungary) for a time period that covers multiple regimes: Socialist autocracy (1945– 1990), liberal democracy (1990–2010) and a so-called “hybrid regime” (Levitsky and Way 2010) which in Hungary is associated with the second and third Orbán governments (2010–2018)
Summary
During the past decades, punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has become one of the fastest developing subfield of policy studies (Weible 2014: 10), and a premier field of empirical studies concerning policy issue priorities. Institutions, ideologies and norms all play a part in stabilising behaviour and, add an element of friction vis-á-vis driving forces for policy change (such as interest group lobbying or social movements) This theory of stick-slip dynamics in public policy-making has been put to the test in a score of research articles with a domestic or comparative focus, and with geographical scope mostly covering the USA and Western European democratic countries (Baumgartner et al 2009; Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009; Walgrave and Vliegenthart 2010; Brouard 2013; Green-Pedersen and Walgrave 2014; Bonafont, Palau, and Baumgartner 2015; Vliegenthart et al 2015; Baumgartner, Breunig, and Grossman 2019)
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