Democratic Innovations and Hungarian Parties

Research on democratic innovations has for a long time focused mainly on western democracies and have for a long time been regarded as a marginal phenomenon in Central and Eastern Europe and most studies in recent years have focused on challenges to democracy rather than on democratic innovativeness. To date, there is only a limited amount of studies that have reflected on post-communist examples of democratic innovations. In order to provide a unitary understanding about how and why Hungarian parties use democratic innovations the paper focuses on two different arenas: intra-party democracy and parties’ links to the society. In Hungary, the spread of democratic innovations to complement the institutions of representative democracy is limited. Most established innovations (e.g. national and local referendum) are controlled by party politicians, citizens' successful bottom up initiatives are exceptional. However, recently a number of new practices have been developed within the parties (e.g. online decision-making forums), between parties to coordinate candidate selection (primaries), to consult citizens about policy issues at national level (national consultation) and local consultation (e.g. citizen’s juries in small villages). The paper aims: 1, to locate democratic innovations that been born in the past decade within the Hungarian parties; 2, to investigate new institutions that have been put in place at national and local levels to make citizens participate more; 3, to reveal how democratic innovations change relations between voters and politicians; 4, to find out how representatives elected through party democracy evaluate deliberative and participative democracy. No systematic, comparative research has been conducted about the Hungarian case therefore my research can fill the gap and put Hungary on the map of democratic innovations.