Refine
Year of publication
- 2017 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Contribution to a Periodical (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Czech Republic (1)
- Eastern Europe (1)
- Hungary (1)
- Poland (1)
- Slovakia (1)
- democracy (1)
- democratic consolidation (1)
- illiberalism (1)
- nationalism (1)
- populism (1)
Institute
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (2)
- Präsidium (1)
Prof. Brigitte Geißel und ihr Team von der Forschungsstelle Demokratische Innovationen an der Goethe-Universität beschäftigen sich mit der Krise der repräsentativen Demokratie, wie sie im Augenblick unter dem Eindruck der letzten Bundestagswahl verstärkt auch in der Öffentlichkeit diskutiert wird. „Wahlen und Parteienwettbewerb sind lediglich die Form, die wir heute am besten kennen; dieses institutionelle Set ist aber nicht der innerste Kern von Demokratie“, so das Team der Forschungsstelle in seinem folgenden Beitrag.
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.