Illiberal Regimes Research Articles

“Those on the Right Take Chloroquine”: The Illiberal Instrumentalisation of Scientific Debates during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brasil

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brasilian government has undergone a significant political dispute over the use of hydroxychloroquine as a measure to confront the disease and contested scientific and healthcare organisations findings related to the drug's effectiveness. In this article, we seek to understand the manner in which an illiberal populist government and the supporters thereof refer to scientific discourse during the pandemic, with a focus on the debates on Brasilian far-right networks on Twitter. Using a mixed methodology with statistical methods, social media analysis, natural language processing and qualitative content analysis, this study seeks to investigate which sources and stakeholders were referenced and the narratives that structured the arguments of far-right supporters who defended the use of hydroxychloroquine. The results highlight the use of sources that are ideologically aligned to the right and a reconfiguration of scientific authority that was supported by illiberal values. Among the main discourses, we observed an epistemic challenge with a partisan bias, which led to the scientific authority legitimising some arguments and discrediting others. We also identified the spread of conspiracy theories that reflected the epistemic challenge, in addition to conservative, revivalist and individualistic postures.

Populisms: Inherently Illiberal or Plausibly Democratic?

The central question of this paper is whether a constructive relationship between populism and democratisation may exist, or whether all types of populism inevitably lead to illiberal regimes. Anglo-Saxon and Eurocentric traditions tend to identify populism with fascism, as in the case of authoritarian right-wing regimes, or with left-wing politics as in the case of socialist or communist systems that produce totalitarian regimes. Critical theorists consider populism to be a reaction to a perceived gap separating democratic institutions from the popular sovereignty from which political regimes derive their legitimacy. This paper examines populisms from three main perspectives: (1) negative views of populism from a liberal democracy perspective; (2) positive views from theorists who see populism as a legitimate expression of popular sovereignty; and (3) some ways in which populism may be viewed based on Leonardo Morlino’s definition of a hybrid regime and the experiences of several Latin American countries.

EU Values Are Law, after All: Enforcing EU Values through Systemic Infringement Actions by the European Commission and the Member States of the European Union

Abstract Although compliance with the founding values is presumed in its law, the Union is now confronted with persistent disregard of these values in two Member States. If it ceases to be a union of Rule-of-Law-abiding democracies, the European Union (EU) is unthinkable. Purely political mechanisms to safeguard the Rule of Law, such as those in Article 7 Treaty of European Union (TEU), do not work. Worse still, their existence has disguised the fact that the violations of the values of Article 2 TEU are also violations of EU law. The legal mechanisms tried thus far, however, do not work either. The fundamental jurisprudence on judicial independence and irremovability under Article 19(1) TEU is a good start, but it has been unable to change the situation on the ground. Despite ten years of EU attempts at reining in Rule of Law violations and even as backsliding Member States have lost cases at the Court of Justice, illiberal regimes inside the EU have become more consolidated: the EU has been losing through winning. More creative work is needed to find ways to enforce the values of Article 2 TEU more effectively. Taking this insight, we propose to turn the EU into a militant democracy, able to defend its basic principles, by using the traditional tools for the enforcement of EU law in a novel manner. We demonstrate how the familiar infringement actions—both under Article 258 and 259 TFEU—can be adapted as instruments for enforcing EU values by bundling a set of specific violations into a single general infringement action to show how a pattern of unlawful activity rises to the level of being a systemic violation. A systemic violation, because of its general and pervasive nature, in itself threatens basic values above and beyond violations of individual provisions of the acquis. Certified by the Court of Justice, a systemic violation of EU law should call for systemic compliance that would require the Member State to undo the effects of its attacks on the values of Article 2. The use of Article 260 Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) to deduct fines from EU funds due to be received by the troubled Member State would provide additional incentives for systemic compliance. We illustrate this proposed militant democratic structure by explaining and critiquing what the Commission and Court together have done to reign in the governments of Hungary and Poland so far and then showing how they can do better.

Collaborative Governance Regimes in Illiberal Democracies: A Comparative Case of Drug Harm Reduction Policy in Central-Eastern Europe

Collaborative governance research and practice seem underdeveloped in Central-Eastern Europe compared to its Western counterpart. Recently, one can also observe a turn from liberal values in CEE. Taking states’ important role in shaping collaborative governance as a starting point, this paper includes a theoretical ambition of developing a classification of collaborative governance regimes. Furthermore, through qualitative analysis of drug harm reduction policies in Visegrád countries, it aims to contribute to the understanding of how illiberal governance affects collaborative governance. The results show that the impact of illiberalism on collaborative governance regimes does not appear uniformly across different policy areas.

How China Builds the Credibility of the Belt and Road Initiative

ABSTRACT Despite persistent skepticism towards the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), many countries have signed on to the program and even more countries have come to believe in its transformative potential to development finance and the global order. How has the illiberal Chinese government succeeded in convincing the world, particularly the Global South, about its commitment and BRI’s future success? Exploring the credibility puzzle, this article argues that the Xi Jinping administration has relied on an all-in strategy tying the BRI to China’s national development and foreign policy, promoting the BRI through select international institutions, and launching a series of flagship mega-projects. With mounting sustainability challenges on both economic and geopolitical fronts, however, the BRI now has to scale back its ambitions while China reevaluates its strategic opportunity.

Illiberalism, polarisation, resilience, and resistance

Illiberal regimes undermine human rights norms that entail equal legal protections of citizens and social groups. Illiberal actors often intentionally drive social polarisation in hopes of bolstering their support and securing their political position. This strains liberal democratic-oriented social resilience and provokes resistance to the illiberal regime. The articles in this special issue, looking at the regimes and societies of Central and Eastern Europe—where the establishment and operation of illiberal regimes is conspicuous, where ‘pernicious polarisation’ (Somer, McCoy, & Luke, 2021) that strains social resilience is often striking, and where resistance is crucial to halt or reverse illiberalisation—address this nexus of concepts. In this introduction, we review the four key concepts that undergird the special issue’s articles.

The everyday abnormal and the quest for normalcy

Illiberal regimes and societies test resilience and provoke resistance, especially from targeted minority groups. But this abstraction can obscure the complexity of specific events and participants’ emotional motivation. What are the emotional and cognitive responses of protest participants within illiberal contexts? This article investigates this question by focusing on LGBT-rights protest participants in contemporary Poland. Using testimony from in-depth semi-structured interviews with participants from 2019 equality marches, we identify emotional and cognitive responses that centre around a quest for normalcy. Illiberal politics in Poland, especially when contrasted with perceptions about LGBT acceptance in neighbouring countries, have made everyday life 'abnormal,' where LGBT individuals fear increasing violence and feel unable to act normally. Protest participation opens a space where LGBT individuals and allies can feel normal. This experience of normalcy effectively claims recognition of one's 'normal' humanity. In turn, this builds resilience within participants to endure the deterring effects of everyday life and to continue their advocacy for LGBT rights.

Illiberalism and National Sovereignty

This Chapter sheds light on illiberalism and its relationship to national sovereignty through drawing a comparison with liberalism’s relationship to national sovereignty. The immediate political context of the liberal regime today is typically the sovereign nation state. Equally, the immediate political context of the illiberal regime – in whose perspective liberal values are secondary and in at least some measure dispensable - is also the sovereign nation state. This is no coincidence. Liberalism and illiberalism alike identify sovereignty and nationalism as important enabling conditions, and there is sufficient overlap in the manner in which and the consequences with which those enabling conditions operate in these ostensibly contrasting regimes that there is inevitable seepage from one to the other. Illiberalism, then, should be considered as the shadow and temptation of liberalism, as much as its normative inverse and a reaction against it. The chapter concludes by assessing and comparing the apparently rising prospects of populist illiberalism today in both Central European and Western European states, keeping that close relationship with the liberal alternative in mind.

Illiberalism, revolution and the 2016 Macedonian elections

To what extent are social movements capable of steering voters’ choices in illiberal societies? This paper departs from a corruption-based conception of illiberalism, whereby ‘the misuse of public office for private gain’ in the shape of bribery, nepotism, clientelism and misuse of public party funding, presents itself as one of the foremost components of illiberal rule. Through the empirical exploration of Macedonia’s 2016 Colourful Revolution, this paper aims to examine the potential of Anti-Corruption Movements (ACMs) in enhancing the electoral punishment of illiberal elites. Drawing from original survey data and a set of semi-structured interviews with representatives of the Colourful Revolution and members of the Macedonian civil society, this paper aims at shedding light upon the effects of ACMs on electoral behaviour and, ultimately, on the political potential of ACMs in the reversal of a country’s illiberal course. The study finds strong indicators pointing to the Colourful Revolution’s encouraging role in stoking increasingly negative perceptions towards Macedonia’s illiberal government ahead of the 2016 election, but primarily among voters that had not supported the main government party in the previous election.

Demobilization Processes

There is abundant literature on individual-level characteristics that encourage citizens to participate in political demonstrations. However, empirical studies on demobilization and factors that prevent people from joining protests remain scarce. In this paper, I zero in on the perceived risks of political participation. Two questions are examined: first, how protest willingness is shaped by perceived risks, and second, what political and socio-economic factors explain risk perception. I answer these questions using the representative sample of 800 Hungarian university students from the Active Youth Survey (2019). Hungary has a special position in Europe because it is defined neither as a liberal democracy nor as sheer autocracy, but an ‘illiberal regime’. In non-democratic illiberal societies the state does not apply overt repressive techniques against dissident groups, although protest participation is still not a riskless form of political action, as regarded in developed democracies. I apply logistic regression models to predict both protest willingness and perceived risks of protest. Results confirm the importance of risks in extra-parliamentary protest politics, since almost half of the university students see their participation in demonstrations as somewhat risky. Regression models show that perceived risks are to some extent politicized, but risks have their own significant role in explaining protest (un)willingness.

The ‘Insecurity Toolbox’ of the Illiberal Regime: Rule by Law and Rule by Exclusion

Abstract This article scrutinizes the ‘insecurity toolbox’ that Hungary’s illiberal regime relies on in order to create an increasingly authoritarian system that sidelines the opposition and silences discontent. While authoritarian shifts are widespread, what makes the case of Hungary unique is that it involves a member state of the European Union. We identify three important features of the regime: (1) it relies on securitization by using an anti-immigrant meta-frame to justify virtually all policies and identify enemies whose presence justifies exceptional measures; (2)it applies law instrumentally and rules by law, which effectively undermines the rule of law and its guarantees against arbitrariness; (3)it maintains a screen of compliance with democratic and constitutional norms. While the EU seems impotent, or unwilling to halt this authoritarian backsliding, the Hungarian government feels it necessary to fake compliance with democratic norms by adopting policies that formally acquiesce to European standards but contradict them in essence.

EU Values Are Law, After All: Enforcing EU Values Through Systemic Infringement Actions by the European Commission and the Member States of the European Union

Although compliance with the founding values is presumed in its law, the Union is now confronted with persistent disregard of these values in two Member States. If it ceases to be a union of Rule-of-Law-abiding democracies, the EU is unthinkable. Purely political mechanisms to safeguard the Rule of Law, like those in Article 7 TEU, do not work. Worse still, their existence has disguised the fact that the violations of the values of Article 2 TEU are also violations of EU law. The legal mechanisms tried thus far, however, do not work either. The fundamental jurisprudence on judicial independence and irremovability under Article 19(1) TEU is a good start, but it has been unable to change the situation on the ground. Despite ten years of EU attempts at reining in Rule of Law violations and even as backsliding Member States have lost cases at the Court of Justice, illiberal regimes inside the EU have become more consolidated. More creative work is needed to find ways to enforce the values of Article 2 TEU more effectively. Taking this insight, we propose to turn the EU into a militant democracy, able to defend its basic principles, by using the traditional tools for the enforcement of EU law in a novel manner. We demonstrate how te familiar infringement actions – both under Article 258 and 259 TFEU – can be adapted as instruments for enforcing EU values by bundling a set of specific violations into a single general infringement action to show how a pattern of unlawful activity rises to the level of being a systemic violation. A systemic violation, because of its general and pervasive nature, in itself threatens basic values above and beyond violations of individual provisions of the acquis. Certified by the Court of Justice, systemic violation of EU law should call for systemic compliance that would require the Member State to undo the effects of its attacks on the values of Article 2. The use of Article 260 TFEU to deduct fines from EU funds due to be received by the troubled Member State would provide additional incentives for systemic compliance. We illustrate this proposed militant democratic structure by explaining and critiquing what the Commission and Court together have done to reign in the governments of Hungary and Poland so far and then showing how they can do better.

Denmark and Nord Stream 2: A small state's role in global energy politics

This article analyses Denmark's involvement with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Impressing the Baltic as a sea of strategic significance and a potential international flashpoint, the controversial project thrust Denmark into a position of decision-making importance beyond its size and material power. Geopolitical and environmental considerations, and normative impetus derived from a liberal democratic political culture, influenced Danish attitudes towards the project. The impact of these concerns substantially delayed the granting of a permit for pipeline construction in the Danish marine space, frustrating governments and business in Russia and Germany. Ultimately, approval was granted because Denmark is a rule of law state. Yet the delay is crucial. More broadly, the article illustrates how, in the energy policy domain, illiberal regimes attempt to exploit liberal-democratic legal systems through nominally commercial entities, and considers the responses by other actors in this case.

In its Nature—How Stealth Authoritarianism Keeps Stealing Along During the Pandemic, and How Can it be Stopped?

This essay illustrates, through certain measures taken by the Hungarian government during the COVID19-epidemic, how the very nature of illiberal regimes determines their ways of dealing with national crises. How at times that call for unity, they opt for increasing polarization; how instead of transparency, they choose to restrict freedom of expression; and how they use the crisis to further weaken checks and balances instead of reinforcing public trust in the government by strengthening oversight of the executive. The essay also argues that despite the undeniable difficulties such situations pose to human rights work, they also present a unique opportunity to—more effectively than before—re-explain and re-present human rights as a matter of importance to all members of society—majority and minority alike. The experience that in crisis situations belonging to the mainstream may not protect one from becoming vulnerable and exposed to abuses by those in power, may enable rule of law and human rights advocates to better convey the message that the accountability of the executive branch is crucial to a well-functioning democracy, while an illiberal regime does not provide sufficient protection against such instances of government overreach.

Liberty, Security, and Accountability: The Rise and Fall of Illiberal Democracies

We study a model of the rise and fall of illiberal democracies. Voters value both liberty and economic security. In times of crisis, voters may prefer to elect an illiberal government that, by violating constitutional constraints, offers greater economic security but less liberty. However, violating these constraints allows the government to manipulate information, in turn reducing electoral accountability. We show how elements of liberal constitutions induce voters to elect illiberal governments that remain in power for inefficiently long—including forever. We derive insights into what makes constitutions stable against the rise of illiberal governments. We extend the model to allow for illiberal governments to overcome checks and balances and become autocracies. We show that stronger checks and balances are a double-edged sword: they slow down autocratization but may make it more likely. We discuss the empirical relevance of our theoretical framework and its connection to real world examples.

Keeping a Promise: Roles, Audiences and Credibility in International Relations

States, governments and leaders often reject one another’s role prescriptions. They stick to enacting their role, what they consider to be their central purpose and main promise within a given international society. By applying the main tenets of role theory, this essay looks at the reasons why actors sometimes reject the prescriptions of others, including attempts at bargaining. Rather than claiming that those prescriptions are rejected on account of the pursuit of self-identity or ontological security, this essay suggests that those positions have more to do with defending the public credibility of one’s master role, the core promise made by an actor to (domestic and/or international) audiences. Master roles have to do with the main promises of an actor in a given social and political order, thereby providing credibility to a domestic and international audience. Without maintaining credibility, the actor is unlikely to be able to fulfil master and auxiliary roles as initially set out. The essay contributes to role theory in three ways: by looking beyond explanations centred on identification and ontological security, by conversely building upon public credibility, and also by showing how audiences and roles matter to illiberal regimes. To illustrate the argument, the essay addresses the government of Uzbekistan’s attempt to keep credibility in the face of Russian altercasting in the 1990s.

Identity Politics or Economics? Explaining Voter Support for Hungary’s Illiberal FIDESZ

This article tests cultural and economic explanations of why the longest surviving illiberal government in Central Europe, Hungary’s FIDESZ, has maintained popular support throughout two elections despite dismantling institutional checks and balances. Much of the literature on illiberalism in Central Europe attributes the appeal and successes of these governments to the brand of identity politics and rhetorical vilification of “others” practiced by their leaders. Yet the role of economic growth, a strong determinant of voter behaviour, has received little theoretical attention in accounting for illiberal party support. Using five rounds of European Social Survey data from 2010 to 2018, I show that economic satisfaction rather than a host of cultural factors, notably anti-migrant and anti-European Union attitudes, better predicts support for FIDESZ and satisfaction with government. I examine the implications of these results for understanding and conceptualising voter behaviour under backsliding. Voters may not understand what backsliding is and therefore are unable to penalise it or they may take information about backsliding into account and judge backsliding to be the price of prosperity. These findings and the discussion of voter behaviour raise important questions about the role of economic growth in sustaining illiberalism in Central Europe and other third wave democracies.

Russia’s great power imaginary and pursuit of digital multipolarity

Over the past two decades, Russia has championed the primacy of national governments in managing the global internet. Scholars attribute Russia’s global internet governance philosophy and practices predominantly to its increasingly authoritarian and illiberal regime under President Vladimir Putin. This article, by contrast, explores how Russian ruling elites’ view of Russia as an immutable great power has directed the subsequent Russian governments’ pursuit of a state-based multipolar digital order. To illuminate cultural continuities in Russia’s approach to global communication governance in the post-Soviet period, I examine its state-centric policymaking initiatives at the International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations in the 1990s.

Imposition to agonism: Voluntary poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China

Implementation of voluntary Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) in Shanxi Province, rural China is a function of the democratic processes of village governance under the Organic Law of Villages Committees and Assemblies. Villages consult with their constituent households on the decision to resettle and aspects of the process of rebuilding homes and livelihood adaptations. This article analyses the participatory process through an analytic of government that exposes the contingency of local governance as liberal techniques are negotiated amongst historical illiberal governance norms. Processes of subjection during resettlement decision making and implementation defy a liberal/illiberal binary as the effects of power during governance can have a duel nature. These effects produce dialectical tensions that the local Party-state draws on to smooth consent for their political economic goals. Villagers in response draw on multiple political and economic subjectivities to reposition themselves and contest intersubjective norms that define relations between governor and governed. Contestation is most aptly defined as agonism which represents the permanent provocation (Foucault, 1982) between liberal and illiberal governance and the potential for equitable resettlement outcomes.

„Nasze” i „odziedziczone” muzea – PiS i Fidesz jako mnemoniczni wojownicy

PiS and Fidesz are mnemonic warriors who tried to enforce their memory politics already during their first government terms – as the analysis of their flagship museums, the Warsaw Rising Museum and the House of Terror in Budapest shows. The current illiberal governments treat museums they ‘inherited’ from their predecessors differently: While PiS changes content at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest ‘only’ lost their directors. Even mnemonic warriors must take international developments like the ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ into consideration. Kaczyński and Orbán favored opening new museums rather than changing museums identified as ‘Jewish’, even those that explicitly deal with Polish and Hungarian complicity. New museums, like the Ulma Family Museum, the House of Fates in Budapest and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, focus on rescuers of Jews and heroic uplifting messages.