The Road to Illiberalism: Informality and Personalized Politics in New Democracies

How can we account for the illiberal turn in post-communist democracies? The present study investigates a causal link between the expansion of personalized politics and the rise of illiberalism by comparatively examining three new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria). The prevalent theoretical understanding is that the personalization of politics is a stage subsequent to the decline of centrality of political parties. Based on qualitative in-depth evidence from semi-structured elite interviews, I observe that in these countries, political personalization through the empowerment of political leaders was present from the initial stages of institution building. The study notes that the parliamentary institutional design limited an increasing level of personalization. However, post-communist political leaders complement or substitute such limitations to their personal authority by favouring informal behaviour and institutions in political decision making. It suggests the need for a research agenda that focuses on informality as a potential tool to understand the prevalence of personalization in the region. It concludes with a discussion of the long – term challenges that personalization sets for the process of democratization and its link to illiberalism.