From democratic pioneer to democratic backslider? A long(er) history of democratic defects in Hungary

While Hungary used to be considered a shining example of post-communist democratization, in recent years, the country has been repeatedly criticized for democratic backsliding. Pointing to the implementation of comprehensive but controversial institutional reforms, most notably the adoption of new media legislation and a new constitution, an anti-pluralist, sometimes populist style of government, and Orbán´s declared intention to build an illiberal state in Hungary, several scholars and politicians cast doubt on the integrity of Hungarian democracy. Even though Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his followers have repeatedly assured their commitment to democracy, insisting that democracy does not necessarily need to be liberal, the transformation of the Hungarian political system occurring since 2010 brings up the following questions: What kind of democracy, if at all, is emerging in Hungary? And what are the political logics behind this transformation? Tracing Hungary´s democratization trajectory since 1989, our paper seeks to make sense of the seemingly sudden democratic backsliding in Hungary. Different from previous accounts of the ongoing political transformation in Hungary, which detail the characteristics of the emerging regime in Hungary and propose new concepts to classify it, our analysis embeds the Hungarian case in the internal scholarly debate on varieties of democracy and hybrid regimes. After contrasting Orbán´s vision of illiberal democracy with the different conceptions of (il)liberal democracy in the political science literature, we survey the current state of democracy in Hungary in an in-depth case study. Based on Mikael Wigell´s (2008) regime typology on the one hand, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) approach on the other hand, we examine whether Hungary meets the minimum requirements of democracy and if yes, what kind of democracy it represents. Furthermore, we seek to shed light on the antecedents of the ongoing reorganization of the Hungarian state. Drawing on V-Dem data, we trace the democratic performance of Hungary between 1989 and 2010 along different dimensions of democracy and compare it with the democratic trajectories of other post-communist countries in the region. In addition, we examine early and recent key speeches of Orbán to detect the ideological foundations underlying the current transformation of the political system in Hungary and investigate whether they have translated into institutional reforms. By taking seriously both the ideological and the institutional antecedents of the newly emerging political regime in Hungary, the analysis provides a better understanding of recent democratic backsliding in Hungary. We argue that while Hungary´s overall democratic performance has indeed deteriorated since 2010, the country has performed surprisingly poorly in meeting the minimum requirements of democracy already from the very beginning of its democratic transition. Making sense of recent trends in Hungary´s democratic development requires taking into account that considerable democratic defects have been present throughout the entire democratization trajectory of post-communist Hungary, which is a fact that the bulk of democratization literature has tended to ignore.