Illiberal politics and the policy process

LIEPP's Environmental policies and Evaluation of Democracy research groups and the CEE's The state as a producer of public policies research group are pleased to convene the seminar: Illiberal politics and the policy process: an overview of the conceptual challenges and empirical evidence.

• Mandatory registration to participate in person
• Mandatory registration to participate via Zoom

Speaker

Zsolt BODA, Research Professor at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, 

Visiting professor at LIEPP, Environmental policies research group.

Abstract

Democratic backsliding and the spread of illiberal political practices, typically embedded into populist politics, have become a global phenomenon in the past decade: the quality of democracy has been declining in the world as each year more countries show signs of autocratization than democratization. A worrying new trend is that these developments are not confined to new, fragile democracies and increasingly affect the world’s long-established democracies as well. In the scholarly literature on democratic backsliding the polity and politics-centred approaches, understandably, prevail. However, there is a growing research on the policy aspects of illiberal political changes as well. The talk will give an overview of the main problems of this research field along the dimensions of policy dynamics, policy content, policy process and policy discourses, relying on the literature as well as original findings of research made in Hungary. The questions the talk will address include: Are policy punctuations larger in illiberal regimes? Are there typical patterns of substantive policy choices by illiberal governments? What are the main effects of illiberal changes on the policy process? Is the quality of policies affected? What is the reaction of policy actors to illiberal reforms? How do policy discourses change in illiberal populism and what is the role of discursive governance under democratic backsliding?

Contact: charlotte.halpern@sciencespo.fr