Structure and Agency and the Consolidation of Personalist Hegemonic Regimes: a Comparative Study of Lukashenka’s Belarus and Meciar’s Slovakia

'Hybrid’ regimes, ‘semi-authoritarianism’, ‘competitive authoritarianism’ and ‘managed democracies’ are some of the terms describing political systems that combine electoral participation with the presence of a dominant political force in power. These regimes resonate with Robert Dahl’s idea of an ‘inclusive hegemony (1971), a regime offering a formal structure of participation but facing no effective contestation, and are organised under the command of strong leaders, such as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Lukashenka in Belarus and Erdogan in Turkey. Scholars have examined the tactics, strategies and policies by which leaders have established a power monopoly without abolishing formal participatory processes. Recent scholarship warns that their ‘toolkit’ can be emulated by populist leaders in advanced democracies to undermine liberal democratic institutions (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Understanding how personalistic leadership can become hegemonic is as imperative as ever. Drawing on my previous work on democracy and hegemony (Trantidis 2014, 2015), I show that a political system’s move to hegemony under a strong leader is not merely a matter of agency – pertinent to the rhetoric, tactics and ideology of the leader – but it largely depends on the socioeconomic structure, particularly the relative autonomy and strength of civil society and the political opposition. Rather than using typical authoritarian means such as police suppression, electoral fraud or banning the opposition, a leader builds a pyramid-like system of socioeconomic control to undermine political pluralism and skew political loyalties, while retaining elections open to his opponents. Leaders use government resources as rewards to elicit personal loyalty and impose socioeconomic sanctions on dissent, thereby making their opponents much less able to gather supporters and resources to effectively challenge their rule. I support this claim by comparing Lukashenka’s successful consolidation in power in Belarus with Meciar’s abortive effort to achieve political dominance in Slovakia in the 1990s.