Zsolt Enyedi

• PhD
• Central European University

We discuss the case of Hungary’s rapid democratic backsliding under Viktor Orbán as an example of legislative capture. We show that, despite relatively unfavorable conditions for autocratization, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party have supervised a well-crafted project of institutional transformation and a comprehensive regrouping of financial resou...

This article discusses various conceptualizations of illiberalism and adopts a definition that equates the concept with the negation of three liberal democratic principles: limited power, a neutral state, and an open society. The second part of the article explores the implications of this definitional strategy for empirical research, describes the...

It is often assumed that right-wing authoritarian and populist parties appeal primarily to negative feelings such as frustration, fear or alienation, and that positive sentiments appear in their discourse mostly in the form of nostalgia. Our hypothesis is that this description fails to apply to leaders in power. This article employs a mixed-methods...

Parties and party systems are treated as separate phenomena in theory, but not in research practice. This is most clearly so in the literature on the institutionalization of party politics, where the party level and the systemic levels are often analyzed through combined fuzzy indices. We 1) propose separate indicators for measuring institutionaliz...

An institutionalized party system is often regarded as a precondition for a well-functioning democracy. Recent recesses in democracy and, in particular, in the liberal dimension of democracy in relatively established party systems, however, warrant a fresh look into how party system institutionalization shapes liberal democracy. We use a dataset th...

This paper discusses the ideological modules of the recent wave of autocratization. It detects the emergence of still fragmented but increasingly robust illiberal alternatives. The illiberal discourse is anti-universalist but typically not openly anti-democratic. It gains much of its traction from a backlash against progressive victories in the cul...

The paper argues for an ideology-centered interpretation of the Orbán regime. I propose that those regimes that promote a particular worldview through their signatory policies and discourse, advantage a well-defined set of values through the allocation of resources, and enact policies on key ideological objectives with long-lasting impact should be...

Arguably, the most fundamental question one can ask about a party system is whether it is bipolar or not. Based on theoretical conjectures and on tendencies one observed during the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as reflecting the position of the academic community at the time (e.g. [Bale, T. (2003). Cinderella and Her ugly sisters: The mainstream a...

Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are und...

Response from the authors to the review of their book

The Orbán government won the 2018 national election with a landslide: it received 48 percent of the votes and—due to the disproportional electoral system and the fragmented opposition—68 percent of the seats in the Hungarian parliament. Thereby, Fidesz achieved its third consecutive supermajority after 2010 and 2014. This success is unparalleled in...

Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explor...

Brave New Hungaryfocuses on the rise of a “brave new” anti-liberal regime led by Viktor Orbán who made a decisive contribution to the transformation of a poorly managed liberal democracy to a well-organized authoritarian rule bordering on autocracy during the past decade. Emerging capitalism in post-1989 Hungary that once took pride in winning the...

The fourth chapter presents the profile and the condensed history of the 21 historical party systems that ceased to be democratic. Here we discuss the dynamics of the changes, and relate them to the ideological configurations and alliance structures. We show that the changes in closure figures indicate well the transformations of party politics, we...

This chapter presents the profile and the condensed history of the 41 currently functioning party systems. Here we discuss the dynamics of the changes, and relate them to the ideological configurations and alliance structures. We show that the changes in closure figures indicate well the transformations of party politics, we link developments in th...

After comparing the different indicators (i.e. party institutionalization, fragmentation, polarization, volatility and closure) employed in the book, we show how the Cold War period (1945–1989) was exceptionally stable, especially in contrast to the inter-war and post-Berlin Wall periods. We also show how currently the West looks increasingly like...

The fifth chapter identifies the most important common trends across time in closure, contrasting core and periphery countries, various macro-regions of Europe, and different time periods. Dividing the total time span into smaller blocs allows us to control for the age of the party systems, and to see how time-bound the identified configurations ar...

The sixth chapter relates the changes in closure and volatility to general political developments, but it mainly concerns itself with opposing the birth year of party systems to their age. Of course, within the group of currently existing systems these two coincide, but if one adds to the pool historical cases, then one can investigate whether thos...

The eighth chapter looks into inter-temporal and cross-sectional differences in the effective number of parliamentary parties, and analyses the covariation between closure and fragmentation. The chapter allows us to revisit classical debates in comparative politics about the merits and vices of two- and multi-party systems. After showing how the in...

The seventh chapter establishes a theoretical distinction between the party- and the systemic-level analysis of party politics. We introduce new measures of party institutionalization, describe cross-temporal and cross-regional trends, and establish the degree of covariance between closure and party institutionalization. Even though there are many...

This chapter provides a comprehensive explanatory model of party system closure. The model includes the variables analysed in the previous chapters (i.e. age and birth period of democracy, party institutionalization, parliamentary fragmentation, and polarization), with the addition of the degree of economic development, the type of electoral system...

The second chapter introduces the dataset of the book, defines its units of measurement, and operationalizes its key concepts. We discuss the method of creating our principal tool of analysis, the composite closure index. We reflect in detail on the question of how experiences accumulated through time can be taken into account when measuring stabil...

The final chapter examines the impact of party system closure on the survival as well as the quality of democracy. We consider the question of whether closure is a necessary or sufficient precondition for the survival of democracy, and whether the other often proposed measures of party system stability, especially electoral volatility and parliamen...

On New Year’s Day 1993 Czechoslovakia was dissolved, giving place to two new European countries, Czechia and Slovakia. Czechs and Slovaks lived under Habsburg rule for centuries, then, between 1918 and 1938 and between 1945 and 1993, under a common state. Their coexistence, their shared culture and their common experience of Communism provided them...

The first chapter lays the foundation for a cooperation-focused way of thinking about party politics. It provides reasons why its analysts should go beyond individual parties and consider blocs of parties. It introduces the concept of poles, as distinct from blocs, and builds a party system typology around them. The second part of the chapter elabo...

The ninth chapter considers polarization as a systemic property, manifested by the proportion of votes collected by anti-political-establishment parties. We find that virtually all party systems that collapsed had high levels of polarization. We also detect a clear tendency towards increasing polarization during the last half century, with importan...

The Introduction starts with some examples of pairs of old and new democracies, some larger, some smaller, some in the East, some in the South, and illustrates how party system development can differ despite very similar background conditions. We then proceed to identify four main factors that differ within each pair, as possible explanations of th...

The Introduction starts with some examples of pairs of old and new democracies, some larger, some smaller, some in the East, some in the South, and illustrates how party system development can differ despite very similar background conditions. We then proceed to identify four main factors that differ within each pair, as possible explanations of th...

The Introduction starts with some examples of pairs of old and new democracies, some larger, some smaller, some in the East, some in the South, and illustrates how party system development can differ despite very similar background conditions. We then proceed to identify four main factors that differ within each pair, as possible explanations of th...

The Introduction starts with some examples of pairs of old and new democracies, some larger, some smaller, some in the East, some in the South, and illustrates how party system development can differ despite very similar background conditions. We then proceed to identify four main factors that differ within each pair, as possible explanations of th...

Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explor...

Attitudinal correspondence between voters and candidates is an integral part of the chain of political representation. This chapter finds a high level of congruence between party elites and masses in Europe, but candidates appear to be more extreme ideologically than their voters. In older and more polarised democracies, especially if they use prop...

The study of political parties and party systems is intimately linked to the development of modern political science. The configuration of party competition varies across time and across polities. In order to capture this variance, one needs to go beyond the analysis of individual parties and to focus on their numbers (i.e. fragmentation), their in...

The decline of the quality of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe was facilitated by intellectual, ideological, and organizational innovations of a new authoritarian elite. I this article I discuss five such innovations: a particular combination of victim mentality, self-confidence and resentment against the West, the transformation of neighbor...

Zsolt Enyedi and Ferenc Erős 1999. Research on Authoritarianism: East and West compared. In Enyedi and Erős (eds.) Authoritarianism and Prejudice. Budapest: Osiris.1999, 9-29.

The “Europeanization” of Eastern Central European Party Systems, EPSnet Kiosk Plus, 2007, 67-74.

Relationships between Authoritarianism and Political Affiliations. In: Zsolt Speder (ed.) Hungary in Flux: Society, Politics and Transformation. Hamburg: Krämer, 1999, 183-207

The paper answers the question of how antisemitism, and anti-Roma and anti-foreigner attitudes, have changed in Hungary over the last decade. The basis of the analysis is the May 2002 TÁRKI survey on topics such as xenophobia and immigration, the social distance from, and sympathy towards, certain ethnic and national groups, anti-Roma feelings and...

Zsolt Enyedi and Martin Mölder 2018 Populisms in Europe: Leftist, Rightist, Centrist and Paternalist-Nationalist Challengers 2018 In Lise Herman and James Muldoon (eds) Trumping the Mainstream: The Conquest of Mainstream Democratic Politics by Far-Right Populism, London: Routledge, 2018, 54-94.

The Hungarian government’s discriminatory actions against the Central European University constitute one of the most prominent conflicts between an academic institution and a government today. My contribution gives a detailed account of how the conflict has unfolded so far. Various frameworks of interpretation, including democratic backsliding, cul...

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS In an article written in 1995 titled “What Is Different about Postcommunist Party Systems?” Peter Mair applied the method that he called “ ex adverso extr...

The reelection of Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary in April 2018 has entrenched a hybrid regime within the European Union. This article discusses some of the most crucial factors that have led to Hungary’s democratic backsliding and supplied the institutional and cultural bases of Fidesz’s rule. The authors particularly focus on p...

The reelection of Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary in April 2018 has entrenched a hybrid regime within the European Union. This article discusses some of the most crucial factors that have led to Hungary’s democratic backsliding and supplied the institutional and cultural bases of Fidesz’s rule. The authors particularly focus on p...

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we sugges...

The institutionalization of party politics is supposed to contribute to the consolidation of democracies. Analysis of Hungary’s democratic backsliding shows, however, that this is not necessarily the case. This article demonstrates that the combination of populist party strategies, polarized party relations, and the inertia of the party system cons...

The paper analyzes the structure of political attitudes in Europe from the point of view of party elite configurations, and concludes that the covariation of attitudes is best captured by a five-or a six-dimensional model. Left-right identification could be well interpreted in terms of two dimensions. Xenophobia and Euroscepticism converged between...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are increasingly popular, yet little is known about their impact. This article investigates their influence on party choice, party loyalty and electoral participation, relying on a complex experiment conducted before and after the 2010 Hungarian election. Participants were directed to two VAAs, some received advice...

The paper presents a socio-psychological causal model of political intolerance in Hungary, on the basis of a national random sample survey data (N=1002). The research improves on the existing models in two directions: by constructing a more complete model through inclusion of a wider set of potentially relevant variables, and by using more reliable...

Through the analysis of the ideology of two Hungarian parties typically considered as populist, this paper investigates how elitism can be integrated into an overall populist appeal. The two parties, Fidesz and Jobbik, are shown to offer two different formulae to the challenges that affect many authoritarian populist movements, but they both exhibi...

During the global financial crisis a number of peripheral populist parties became major players. Hungary was, however, the only country where parties often described as populist, Fidesz and Jobbik1, managed to receive about two thirds of the vote and where one such party, Fidesz, obtained the constitutional majority in two consecutive elections. Th...

A kötet az OTKA által támogatott (K 106220) Jelöltek és képviselők c. kutatás néhány eredményét tartalmazza. A három éven át tartó munka nyomán négy adatbázis és több már megjelent, illetve megjelenés alatt álló publikáció készült el a Corvinus Egyetem Politikatudományi Intézetének keretében működő Elitkutató Központ gondozásában. Időben és tartalm...

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we sugges...

The article reflects on Peter Mair's work in addressing the claims of the decline of party thesis. The cartel party model is discussed, the relationship between parties and the state, the collusion of parties, the quality of representation provided by them, their organizational responses to environmental change, and their patterns of competition. C...

MPs are privileged agents. They can choose whom to regard as their principal: the entire nation, a particular electoral district or a political party. Focusing on two countries with mixed electoral systems, Romania and Hungary, the article documents the dominance of the electoral logic of role-formation over the constraints of legislative organizat...

The study of cleavages focuses primarily on constraints imposed by socio-demographic factors. While scholars have not ignored the agency of political elites, such scholarship remains fragmented among sub-fields and lacks a coherent conceptual framework. This article explores both temporal stability and positional alignments linking vote choice with...

The majority of scholars agree that, both conceptually and empirically, the stability of the pattern of competition for government is an essential aspect of party system institutionalization (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995; Mainwaring, 1998; Morlino, 1998; Bielasiak, 2002; Melesevich, 2007, etc.). This approach is best exemplified by Peter Mair´s (199...

The findings presented in the chapter suggest that party identity is related more to satisfaction with democracy and to political efficacy than to social background. The polarized emotional and cognitive map of politics has an even larger impact on the intensity of partisan attachments. Older, polarized countries with fewer constraints on the parli...

Since the publication of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford's (1950) classic study, considerable debate has developed concerning the political and ideological correlates of authoritarianism. This paper examines relationships between authoritarianism, on the one hand, and self-identification with ideological labels, attitudes toward pol...

As a result of various political and non-political developments, the socio-culturally anchored and well structured character of European party systems has come under strain. This article assesses the overall social embeddedness of modern party politics and identifies newly emerging conflict-lines. It draws attention to phenomena that do not fit int...

The article examines four centre-right parties in East-Central Europe in order to assess the impact of ideology on party organization and revisit the thesis of organizational weakness in the region. The data collected indicate that, together with electoral success, inherited resources and national context, ideology does indeed shape the style of or...

According to Sullivan et al.’s (Sullivan et al. 1979, 53-55, Sullivan et al. 1985) theory, social and psychological factors play different roles in political tolerance. Target-group selection is shaped by socio-demographic characteristics, since in this way people try to adjust themselves to their social environment. On the other side, the degree o...

This chapter analyses various aspects of party politics in Hungary and demonstrates that the country developed genuine party government,in the decade after transition to democracy in 1990. However, while their overwhelming control of the whole political process is taken for granted the parties fulfill relatively few social functions and tend to be...

The chapters included in this volume have covered much ground, from the place of parties in the accession referendums to the strategies followed by parties in the 2004 EP elections. In this concluding chapter we return to the themes and questions raised in Chapter 1 and discuss those aspects of the parties and party systems on which the EU and proc...

The literature on the impact of European integration (see Mudde, 2004; Henderson, 2005; Lewis, 2005) highlights the fragility of the post- communist party systems, suggesting the possibility for a more robust EU influence in the region than in Western Europe. The present chapter investigates one of the more stable, crystallized party systems of Eas...

This article analyses the financial and organisational profile of the major Hungarian political parties. The question investigated is whether the structure of income and expenditure and the organisational make-up of parties are related to each other, and whether these patterns are compatible with the general rules of party finance, the ideology and...

Zsolt Enyedi and Bojan Todosijević 2006. Postmaterialism and authoritarianism in Hungary: Evidence from a two-generations study . In Russel Farnen, Henk Dekker, Christ'l De Landtsheer, Heinz Suenker, and Daniel B. German (eds.) Political Culture, Socialization and Education: Interdisciplinary and Cross National Perspectives for a New Century. Frank...

Through the analysis of Hungarian politics, this article demonstrates how parties become embedded in the social, cognitive and emotive structures of societies. The role of agency in cleavage formation is addressed, with a special emphasis on the mechanism through which political parties structure their environments. Next to the popularization of co...

How do religious institutions cope with the realities of democratization? This article explores the question through an examination of the relationship between the state, political parties and the Catholic Church in the Czech Republic and Hungary. It examines the extent to which the churches have accepted and internalized democratic values, have pu...

Bojan Todosijević and Zsolt Enyedi 2005 Understanding Authoritarianism. Psychological Antecedents and Ideological Consequences ) Central European Political Science Review, vol. 4., no. 15, 35-51.

  Various authors have hypothesized that corporatist institutional arrangements favor the development of ‘new politics’: new social movements, concern for issues such as peace and ecology, postmaterialist orientation and voting for left-libertarian parties. This article analyzes the relationships between corporatism and ‘new politics’ using Siaroff...