The patterns of tacit and explicit collusion on EU policy-making: the Hungarian case

In many cases, the EU's decision-making processes and voting rules encourage cooperation (Häge, 2013) and coalitions (Elgström et al., 2001) between Member States. These can be aimed at promoting certain policy issues, shaping agenda-setting (Princen, 2007), or hindering certain policies by vetoing or blocking minorities. The resulting cooperation between Member States can be seen as a form of collusion (Ivaldi et al., 2003), aimed at shaping EU decisions. Collusion may be explicit, when open, formal cooperation between member states is established, such as the Visegrad Group, the Three Seas Initiative or the Weimar Triangle, and informal, when the leaders of countries openly declare their cooperation. There is also the possibility of collusion in a tacit way, where we see neither formal cooperation nor open partnership between Member States, but where votes or proposals reveal collusion. The possible methods of collusion can be described along the lines of exit and voice strategies (Hirschmann, 1972), where exit can be described as voting against a proposal, vetoing, appealing to the courts, while voice strategies can be applied in the context of various statements and discussions. The aim of our study is to show how the mode and tools of collusion have changed in the case of illiberal democracies such as Hungary (Kornai, 2015). Our hypothesis is that as a result of the transformation, Western liberal democracies are cooperating less and less with Hungary, but this does not mean that cooperation is ending. However, these cooperations are being altered due to decision-making pressures and the negative perception of Hungary leads liberal democracies to tacit rather than explicit cooperation, while this effect is not observed in the case of other illiberal democracies (e.g. Poland). Our second hypothesis is that the tools are also changing and that illiberal democracies are more often using the exit strategy instead of voice. To answer our research question, we will review the strategy and outcome of formal cooperation meetings in which Hungary participates and examine the Hungarian Prime Minister's official meetings with leaders of other Member States, but also web-scraping and text-mining, performing qualitative text analysis from the statements of leaders in the media (e.g. Euronews, Politico). After carefully separating tacit and explicit collusion and voice and exit strategies of these interest groups, we show their detected impacts on formulation of EU policy making.