Political Obligation in Electoral Authoritarianism: The Case of Hungary

This chapter explores whether citizens of so-called electoral autocracies have a general moral obligation to obey the law. The answer may seem obvious. Since democracy is widely considered to be a necessary condition of legitimate authority, nondemocratic regimes, including electoral autocracies, lack legitimate authority and therefore their citizens do not have an obligation to obey the law just because it is the law. While the chapter does not challenge this conclusion, it argues that electoral autocracies have some normatively distinctive characteristics that ground special reasons for disobedience for members of a particular social group: opposition partisans. In addition to the wrongs that characterize all autocracies, the electoral variety tends to inflict the distinct wrong of partisan subordination on supporters of the democratic opposition. The chapter supports its arguments about the distinct normative dynamics of electoral authoritarianism by drawing on the recent political history of Hungary as it was turned from a putatively stable democracy into electoral autocracy.