Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation: Hungary in the 1990s and 2000s

Using data on social protest the paper demonstrates that after the collapse of communism the development of Hungarian civil society has been characterized by asymmetric trends. Over time, Left-liberal actors, which due to inherited strengths were initially best endowed with organizational and ideational resources, lost their dominance in civil society, and the battle of mobilization for contentious collective action. Conversely, actors of the Right have gradually worked off their initial disadvantage in social embeddedness, have taken deeper roots in society, and eventually became able to set the terms of civil organization and protest.

The paper elaborates how these dynamics in civil society development might have interfered with the processes of democratic consolidation. The Left-liberal practices of keeping democratic politics and policy making "above" the sphere of society might have impeded democratic consolidation by discouraging popular democratic engagement. By the same token, the rightist practices of bypassing parliament and appeal to the people directly through civil organization and permanent mobilization might have impeded democratic consolidation “from below” by not respecting the results of democratic elections and undermining trust in democratic institutions in yet other ways.