The Social Determinants of Illiberalism: A Comparative Analysis of Democratic Backsliding in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland

The recent illiberal turn of Hungary and Poland has puzzled researchers, especially compared to the weakness of illiberalism the Czech Republic. Relying on an innovative comparative framework the paper proposes to reorient the scholarship on democratization to focus on how the particular policies that facilitated the international integration of these countries and the resulting social and elite polarization affected the chance of democratic consolidation. Using a comparative historical analysis focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the paper argues that the varying strength of illiberalism might be explained by a) the differences in the demobilization and rightward turn of the working middle classes as a precondition for illiberal elite groups to gain a foothold in the political arena; and b) by the differences in the polarization of the economic elite and the strength of the push emanating from a group of the rising native capitalist class to ensure access to state protection and increased resources for capital accumulation in competition with the dominant internationalized segment of the economic elite. The case studies show how structural conditions interacted with individual preferences of elite actors and policy makers in key policy episodes resulting in different degrees of illiberalism during the second phase of the post-socialist transition. Understanding de-democratization in the CEE region helps researchers in reformulating the dominant theories of transition and provides lessons about socially and democratically sustainable transformations.