TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bustikova, Lenka
A1  - Guasti, Petra
T1  - The illiberal turn or swerve in Central Europe?
T2  - Politics and governance
N2  - Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.
KW  - Czech Republic
KW  - democracy
KW  - democratic consolidation
KW  - Eastern Europe
KW  - Hungary
KW  - illiberalism
KW  - nationalism
KW  - Poland
KW  - populism
KW  - Slovakia
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/49956
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-499565
SN  - 2183-2463
N1  - © The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
VL  - 5
IS  - 4
SP  - 166
EP  - 176
PB  - Lisbon
CY  - Cogitatio Press
ER  -