Illiberal cultural policies in Central and Eastern Europe: A comparative analysis

The recent rise of illiberal actors in Central and Eastern Europe has generated notable interest in the literature on democratic backsliding. An emerging strand of research addresses the policy impact of these actors once they are in power. However, most existing work has focused on policy areas that have witnessed drastic transformations in the region, especially gender and immigration policies. Cultural policies, in contrast, have received less attention or have been limited to single-country case studies. This article adopts a comparative perspective to evaluate what impact populist and illiberal parties in government have had on the cultural policies in Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Several aspects of cultural policies are analyzed, including aims and ideologies, institutional and legislative changes, access and participation, and distribution of economic resources. The findings indicate that the extent to which illiberal actors have instrumentalized cultural policies to serve their political agendas has been a function of their ideological character. While the populist radical right governing parties of Hungary and Poland have abused culture as a vehicle of transmitting their nationalist and conservative narratives, their Czech and Slovak counterparts took a more pragmatic and institutional approach to cultural policy. The encountered diversity allows for a better conceptualization of illiberal cultural policies and is also relevant for broader analyses of illiberal policies of populists in power.