Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Extreme Polarization Under Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: Turkey and Hungary in Comparative Perspective

Notwithstanding its benefits for democracies such as mobilization of society, stabilization of party competition, and simplification of choices for voters, political polarization can easily become a double-edged sword and lead to a deterioration of democratic governance in different contexts. Recently, diverse countries such as Hungary, Turkey, and Poland experienced democratic backsliding (Bermeo 2016) and autocratization (Cassini and Tomini 2018) under severe polarization. In these cases, polarization has taken severe forms through a process in which cross-cutting differences has aligned into a single dimension in which politics increasingly become perceived in terms of “Us” versus “Them” (McCoy, Rahman and Somer 2018). The pernicious consequences of such severe polarization for democratic regimes has been documented in various domestic settings (see, McCoy, Rahman and Somer 2018; McCoy and Somer 2019, among others). Once set in motion, the so-called pernicious polarization takes a life on its own by contaminating the societal sphere. Under such a severe societal politicization, polarization becomes something that is difficult to reverse. Such a problem intensifies under democratic backsliding and autocratization as polarizing figures’ capacity to sustain the dynamics of polarization significantly increases within such regime level contexts which leads to a vicious cycle of polarization-democratic regression-further polarization. Although recent seminal studies succinctly shed light on the root causes of severe polarization and the causal mechanisms through which such a polarization has pernicious consequences for democratic regimes, delineation of conditions for successful de-polarization continue to remain as an important lacuna in the literature. Aim of this paper is to uncover the conditions and causal mechanisms of successful de-polarization campaigns under competitive authoritarian regimes. Considering the instrumental/political and relational nature of pernicious polarization, it aims to uncover the conditions of successful de-polarization strategies in Turkey. To further substantiate the findings, it also compares recent local elections with the one in Hungary. Both Hungary and Turkey stand out as experimental cases to uncover the conditions of successful de-polarization and opposition victory under competitive authoritarianism.