Description
Although illiberal governments are often hypothesized to maintain popular support through creating an unlevel playing field in terms of electoral rules, resources available to their opponents or income redistribution, the case of Hungary demonstrates how the creative use of plebiscitarian democratic tools may create “genuine” public support for illiberal policies. Through the instrument of the so called “national consultations”, the Hungarian government has mimicked participatory government in a simplistic yet effective way, through launching a series of quasi-referenda to obtain popular approval for illiberal policies whose foundations have been established through massive media campaigns. Although national consultations have systematically used manipulative questions and distorted narratives to garner support for measures like the new constitution adopted in 2011, the government has defended them as a genuine effort to incorporate “people’s views” into policy-making. Throughout the twelve national consultations so far, the questionnaires have increasingly lost their ambition to offer meaningful choices to respondents and became tools to demonstrate public support for illiberal policies through dichotomously phrased leading questions. The Hungarian government’s national consultations have mostly been criticized by scholars for not living up to essential democratic standards. However, as this paper will argue, they also effectively serve the governing party’s chances for reelection through 1. enabling a large-scale mobilization of their voter base; 2. providing an unprecedented opportunity to collect supporter data; and 3. offering a powerful device to shape the public agenda. Therefore, even though such consultations’ impact on policy-making is extremely limited, domestic and international actors may adopt them as mobilization tools. The paper surveys similar processes across Europe, particularly the bottom-up electoral programs of the Slovak governing party OL’aNO and the Italian Five Star Movement, as well as Emmanuel Macron’s “broad national consultations” launched in 2022. As the paper will argue, the use of such instruments is not only in sync with the “populist zeitgeist”, but it also lends itself to be instrumentalized by illiberal actors to legitimize their agendas. Future research should address how the use of ever more simplistic tools to involve citizens in policy-making may be prevented, and what alternatives may be offered.| Period | 19 Jul 2023 |
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| Event title | IPSA 27th World Congress of Political Science: Politics in the age of transboundary crises: vulnerability and resilience |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Buenos Aires, ArgentinaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |