Filling the gap between autocratization studies and populism research: how populist leaders affect mechanisms of autocratization and polarization in Central and Eastern Europe

Populism and hybrid regimes are probably the most used catchwords in political science in the past two decades, especially in democratization studies. Indeed, literatures on these phenomena came to the foreground at least since the millennium, mainly in relation to the growing internal and external tensions of contemporary liberal democracies (Benedek 2021d, 200–202). Populism researchers are focusing basically on the inherent dysfunctions of modern democratic politics, especially on deficiencies of its indirect representation mechanisms, especially on deficiencies of its indirect representation mechanisms and the mechanisms of affective polarization, which inevitably leave the door open for populists to remind citizens the seemingly lost redemptive face and promises of representative democracy (Canovan 1999), as the latter’s permanent shadow (Müller 2016) in current populist Zeitgeist (Mudde 2004). Unlike this, the extremely diffuse literature on hybridization goes beyond the terrain of democratic politics by recognizing the end of the salvation historical transition paradigm of the early 1990s (Carothers 2002) and the emergence of new hybrid regimes (Diamond 2002), which try to create an uneven playing field between government and opposition (Levitsky and Way 2010, 53) in order to reap the fruits of electoral legitimacy without significant risks of uncertainty (Schedler 2013, 37). However, while populism researchers tend to pay attention to the political dimension, hence the dynamic elements of a political regime, ‘hybridology’ focuses on the polity and the structural elements of politics (Körösényi 2019, 281), and the gap between them is not completely filled with approaches combining the advantages of them in a complex framework. Therefore, although political scientists have long been trying to answer the question how autocratization happens and how can interpret the modus operandi of various autocratic regimes during the ‘third wave of autocratization’ (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019) in the post-Cold War era, there is a clear gap in the literature between the dynamic and the static approaches aimed at grasping the contemporary democratic and pseudo-democratic/autocratic politics. In this paper, I try to solve the puzzle of post-Cold War autocratization and fill the gap between dynamic and the static approaches with the systematic linking of the concepts populism, autocratization and electoral autocracy, seeking synergy between them – as well as the related broader literatures on hybrid regimes and populism – with the term of populist autocratization and the new model of populist electoral autocracy (PEA). This study aims to go beyond the theoretical-level by shifting attention from populist autocratization and PEA as key concepts to their related empirical manifestations through populist leaders from Central and Eastern Europe in order to understand and explain why and how populist autocratization and polarization in some cases more successful than in others. According to my assumption, illustrative examples of the former are the cases of Viktor Orbán in post-2010 Hungary, Kaczyński twins in Poland since mid-2000s, and Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia since mid-2010s, whereas good examples of the latter could be the cases of Robert Fico in Slovakia between 2006 and 2018, and Bojko Borisov in Bulgaria between 2009 and 2021.