Search Results (19)

The disruptive effect of digital platforms is forcing media companies to rethink their business models, particularly when it comes to increasing revenues from the audience as a share of their total revenues. Audience engagement has become a key issue for media companies since, without it, there is no basis for the introduction of subscription fees, paywalls of any kind, or schemes for soliciting donations/support. Hungary is no exception in this regard; but Hungarian media companies must also contend with other challenges. In a captured media environment, independent media are struggling to survive and have essentially been relegated to the digital space. However, in the last decade, several projects have been launched in the digital market, and many of these projects have become financially sustainable. This sustainability owes largely to the fact that these media companies have been able to monetise their popularity: the awareness of Hungarian media consumers has increased, and more people are willing to pay for quality content. The present study examines the extent to which news media have been able to build communities around their organisations, as well as the special place these communities occupy for many consumers in Hungary’s illiberal democracy. The paper presents the various forms of community-building used by independent media, and it draws on in-depth interviews to examine how media company managers view the importance of these communities. Full article

Political theorists have suggested that democracy is at odds with liberalism. Moreover, with fears about the recent rise in populism, there is growing skepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive. In her recent work, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage, political theorist Gianna Englert argues that voters’ political capacity—rather than democratic political rights—kept nineteenth-century French liberalism open to democracy while fostering citizens’ capacity for democracy. The theorists she discusses anticipated the problems we face today, including citizens being manipulated by unscrupulous and unqualified influencers. Thus, the concern over an uninformed public in democracy is not new. In the meantime, students of comparative politics have found that people can rely on elite cues to make reasoned choices “as if” they had sufficient information, even when they are uninformed and inattentive. However, with social media overtaking traditional media as the primary source of information for many people, this democratic safeguard no longer functions as it should. In this article, to tackle the age-old challenge of ensuring that citizens in democracies are well informed enough to make reasoned choices, we first summarize the problems identified by the nineteenth-century French liberal theorists with the capacity of non-elites to make sound political judgments. We then explore how the comparative politics literature has responded to concerns about an uninformed public in democracy, suggesting that the same mechanism would not work if people get information from social media. We examine the impact of social media on the rise of anti-democratic leaders by manipulating public opinion, which has allowed illiberal, populist politicians to come to power. Full article

The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda has been derailed by various events (e.g., COVID-19, economic crises, democratic backsliding, economic illiberalism, decreasing regard for human rights, and war). These events have diverted attention from the Agenda, and consumed precious limited financial resources that could be used to advance the SDGs. With only five years remaining, this initiative is at serious risk of not achieving its desired objectives and impact. Internal contradictions between the goals, challenges to the funding mechanism, and power imbalances within a country, regionally, and globally need to be addressed. This paper will examine the myriad challenges that countries face in trying to implement the Agenda post COVID-19, including those linked to the actions of developed countries, and explore how important changes to the Agenda could be undertaken all while helping to protect a country’s own policy space. Full article

This article examines the rhetorical affordances of political claims to victimhood by US president Donald Trump during his first and second terms in office. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis to victimhood claims tactically deployed in the discursive performances of the US president, this analysis demonstrates the versatility and multi-functionality of victimhood claims as a political communication strategy in different contexts, which may account for, at least partly, the appeal of far-right populist leaders to national electorates. The analysis calls attention to a novel argumentative pattern, attested in Trump’s empowered victimhood rhetoric upon his inauguration as second-term president of the USA. This pattern consists of constructing prolonged economic injury inflicted on the nation and announcing retribution against the constructed victimizer(s). This emancipated performative style of claiming victimized nationhood is used to justify and forewarn the implementation of illiberal and coercive politics, in this case, the waging of a global trade war by the US president. Focusing on Trump as an original case study of the construction of ‘economic victimhood’ to justify aggressive economic policy, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the rhetorically complex and continuously evolving victimhood rhetoric of authoritarian populists, as well as the leverages accrued thereof, and adds to a growing body of the literature on the discursive–ideological shifts triggered by authoritarian populism. Full article

This article identifies the structural factors underlying the rise of the Populist Radical Right (PRR) in Europe and evaluates its implications for liberal democracies. Our research finds that the emergence of the PRR is driven by the decay of democratic institutions resulting from the neoliberal globalization that was catalyzed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. We argue that the electoral success of the PRR lies in its capacity to use emotionally charged, single-issue narratives that resonate with the political demands of orphaned electorates, who engage in protest voting to express their frustrated expectations. Far from being an ephemeral phenomenon, we show that the PRR reflects structural transformations of the liberal political architecture, and is capable to further eroding democratic institutions by procedurally adopting liberal norms as a means to undermine them. A critical reassessment of the liberal perspective is necessary to address the dysfunctions of democratic institutions. Full article

Two decades after the biggest ever enlargement of the European Union, post-transition countries face a series of challenges, posed primarily by de-globalization and growing illiberalism. Declining European competitiveness, as highlighted by the Draghi Report (2024), calls for major restructuring both regionally and community-wide. This invited survey article attempts to solve a puzzle: if Europeanization has not been very successful, how could it promote globalization? Furthermore, Central Europe counts as a success story, both in terms of convergence and in terms of stabilizing west Europe’s previously restive neighborhood. Sustaining this success is not automatic. We posit the two main conditions. These are: more focus on Ordnungspolitik (single market, competition policy, and capital markets union) and de-emphasis of re-distrubution (CAP and Cohesion). We also show why and how Central Europe will decide the future of the EU and the ways it can cope with globalization. Full article

Populist leaders have consistently rejected evidence-based policies in responding to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They acted later and with less intensity than non-populists in implementing public health measures such as physical distancing, lockdowns, and developing public health data sets. We describe the responses of ten large countries with populist leadership at the onset of the pandemic (Brazil, Hungary, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Together, these countries account for a disproportionately large number of cases and deaths associated with COVID-19 relative to their population. We categorize the policy responses into two types: (1) slow and ineffective, and (2) strict and illiberal. We conclude that while not all countries that responded poorly to the pandemic were led by populists, no countries with populist leadership performed well in either applying public health measures or achieving desirable health outcomes. Full article

With the 2016 double shock of Brexit and Trump, the populist right has become a game-changing force on both sides of the North Atlantic. A proper explanation needs to combine political, economic, and cultural elements. Qua populism, the populist right addresses a political condition, which is neoliberalism’s endemic democracy deficit. However, the illiberal democracy that populists advocate is not a cure for it. Cleavage theory in the Lipset–Rokkan tradition sheds light on the rightist orientation and the nationalist content of this populism. The main explanatory challenge remains the combination of economic and cultural factors in the rise of populism. In economic respect, middle-class decline under a neoliberal order seems to be the root cause of populism. However, its agenda is culture-focused, amounting to a nationalist opposition to immigration and cosmopolitanism. This “cultural deflection” is a persistent puzzle. The minimum to conclude is that one-sided accounts of populism in exclusively economic or cultural terms are unconvincing. Full article

This paper compares the integration of third-country youth in Poland and Hungary in two Central Eastern European contexts characterized by a hostile sociopolitical environment for migrants, right-wing policies, illiberalism, and regression in various related policy areas. Our article is based on a three-year EU-funded research project that investigated the integration of migrant youth in precarious circumstances (MIMY). It uses data from qualitative interviews conducted with migrant youth and thus focuses on the migrant’s perspective while exploring how coping and navigating such hostile environments occurs. The analysis is based on the concept of migrant agency in extremely difficult and complex sociopolitical situations. Our findings highlight the particular importance of the latter in these hostile environments. We argue that while the withdrawal of the state from integration has created difficult contexts for migrant youth, they exhibit different forms of agency, enabling them to adapt to opportunity structures. While these forms of agency are important and real, the structural constraints imposed by hostile states’ anti-immigration and anti-integration attitudes significantly limit migrants’ options for coping with everyday life. Full article

Radical/extremist Islamist actors use social media to disseminate uncompromising stories of monist religious political orders and identities. As a reaction, counter-movements to online Islamist radicalism/extremism emerged in Western societies (and beyond), while uncertainty about effective outcomes remains widespread. In a bid to understand how inclusionary and exclusionary discursive spaces are created, we ask: How do some Muslim actors create discursive spaces open to self-reflection, pluralism and liberal-democratic principles, while others construct illiberal, particularistic and non/anti-democratic spaces? To respond to this question, we compare two contrasting storytellers, one who agitates for exclusionary Islamist radicalism/extremism (Generation Islam) and one who offers inclusionary prevention and deradicalization work against that (Jamal al-Khatib). We draw on novel narrative approaches to the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), via which we compare text-level and context-level narratives disseminated about three Muslim-related crises: the racist terrorist attacks/genocide to represent the national, European and global level. Our two-layered, DHA-inspired narrative analysis illustrates that, at the level of text, narrative persuasion varies between both contrasting actors. While Jamal al-Khatib disseminates persuasive stories, Generation Islam is much less invested in narrative persuasion; it seems to address an already convinced audience. These two text-level strategies reveal their meaning in two antagonistic narrative genres: Jamal al-Khatib’s “self-reflexive savior” creates an inclusionary discursive space represented in a self-ironic narrative genre, while Generation Islam’s ”crusading savior” manufactures an exclusionary discursive space represented in a romance featuring a nostalgic return to the particularistic Islamic umma. Full article

This paper presents a simple formal theoretical model to explain why citizens in authoritarian regimes trust the illiberal official media more than the commercial media. Media trust is defined as changes in the citizen’s belief based on good or bad news from the media. Using this definition, the model evaluates the independent and interaction effect of media bias, censorship, media quality, the citizen’s prior belief of the situation, and the citizen’s ideology on media trust. The findings reconcile some controversies in the literature, and, more importantly, reveal new and subtle explanations the literature did not identify and probably needs to pay attention to. Full article

Various contemporary phenomena of social regression and authoritarianism are related to religious actors, movements, and beliefs. This text, however, seeks to follow this up with the political–theoretical argumentation that New Atheism has to be understood as a way of thinking which carries illiberal and authoritarian tendencies with it as well. In defence of this position, this article will first reconstruct, with reference to Habermas’s and Rawls’s theory of democracy, elements that must include personal beliefs in order to be considered congruent with democratic values. Subsequently, New Atheism’s conception of rational politics will be presented in order to show in which aspects it contradicts the demands of reasonable convictions. This concerns, in particular, the rejection of reasonable pluralism on the one hand and a non-positivistic view of human beings on the other. As a conclusion, this text supports the proposition that, when speaking of the connection between certain worldviews and today’s illiberalism, New Atheism must also be considered as an unreasonable comprehensive doctrine. Full article

This paper refers to the ambivalence of secularization in order to explain why Cultural Christianity can show both a liberal and illiberal character. These two faces of Cultural Christianity are mostly due to the identity functions that, not only faith-based religion, but a particularly culturalized version of religion, entails. Proceeding from this, it will be demonstrated here how Cultural Christianity can turn into a concrete illiberal marker of identity or a resource for illiberal collective identity. Our argument focuses on the link between right-wing nationalism and Cultural Christianity from a historical-theoretical perspective, and illustrates the latter with the example of contemporary illiberal and selective European memory constructions including a special emphasis on the exclusivist elements. Full article

Since 1945, Argentine politics has been largely defined by Peronism, a populist movement established by General Juan Perón. While the ideology of Peronism has shifted and swerved over its seven-decade history, its central emphasis on loyalty has remained constant. This paper examines the notion of “organicity” (organicidad), a Peronist conception of obedience, to elucidate how populist movements valorize discipline and loyalty in order to unify their ranks around sentiment and ritual in the absence of more stable programmatic positions. The original sense of “organicity”, as Perón developed it in his early writings, equated to strict military notions of discipline, obedience, and insubordination. In other words, Perón understood loyalty as an organic conception of discipline that consisted of both unyielding deference for the leader and unwavering commitment to the Peronist Movement. Yet, at particular moments in Argentine political history, Peronist militants either find organicity and loyalty to be intrinsically incompatible, or vocalize definitions of organicity that seem to question the top-down structure of the movement celebrated in Perón’s writings. As a result, among Peronists there is disagreement over what it means to behave organically and loyally. This article draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Peronist militants to argue that populism’s authoritarian preoccupation with fealty attempts to obscure the internal contradictions that result from its lack of clear ideological commitments. However, an emphasis on loyalty cannot produce eternally harmonious uniformity. As Peronists come to view those holding alternate interpretations of their doctrine as heretical and traitorous, their accusations against their comrades reveal the intrinsic fragility of populist unity. Full article