Imperfect Types of Democracy in Central Europe

In "How Democracies Die", Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) argue that today´s democracies fall not because of mass protests or dissatisfaction with democratic idea, but because of popularly elected leaders who undermine established democratic norms. In their view democratic backsliding is a complex process which undermines core principles of liberal or full democracy like the separation of powers, the rule of law, the equal protection of civil and political rights and freedom of the press from populist standpoint. As a result, the crucial question therefore is how to understand democracies that lack some essential elements and face the pressure from populist leaders. Since the demise of the concept of totalitarianism, by and large there is agreement on the two polar types: liberal democracy and some form of “closed” authoritarianism. Approaches of how to organize the space in between (the so called “grey zone”), however, are largely undecided. But this general agreement was disturbed by John Gerring and others (2011) – for them the best category in not only liberal democracy, but also majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative or egalitarian democracy (core principles) and the lower category is electoral democracy which is characterized by certain shortcomings. In the debate about hybrid regimes still exists concept of partial democracy (delegative democracy by O'Donell 1994, illiberal democracy by Zakariya 1997 or defective democracy by Merkel 2004 to name just a few), which is in contrast with classic concept of liberal democracy. On the one hand the idea of democracy with adjectives was strictly rejected (Collier and Levitsky 1997), but on the other hand today's democracy indices are based not only on dichotomy but also on gradation and work with the concept of electoral or flawed democracy (Diamond 2001, V-dem or EIU’s Democracy Index). Therefore, this paper deals with blurred border between full and partial democracy and tries to identify stress tests for democratic institutions which are essential for democratic survival kit. For example, in the region of Central Europe Poland and Hungary are criticized for intervention into the independence of the courts and media or for over-politicizing state administration. Czech Republic is the ambivalent case and Slovakia is threatened by populism and corruption. As a result, illiberalism (as an idea introduced by Viktor Orbán) established itself as the new norm in the region. In this sense Takis Pappas (2014) suggested to work with the concept of populist democracy – in this case we understand populism in minimal definition like democratic illiberalism and the opposite of contemporary pluralism, which is closely connected to liberal democracy. For him populist and liberal democracy are two distinct types of representative democracy, but on the other hand he constructed the mechanism how liberal democracy turn into populist one through multiple stages and tested it on Hungary and Greece. The goal of this paper is therefore to go similar way and test this mechanism on other central Europe states even though this paper has also got the goal to explore if populist democracy is just another term for electoral democracy.