Theories on political opposition and democratic backsliding have identified factors associated with opposition success under authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes. Yet, they have paid limited attention to how these factors interact over time. This article applies insights from this literature – focusing on party policy positioning, opposition mobilisation capacity and democratic innovation – to the Hungarian case following the failed opposition coalition in the 2022 parliamentary election and the subsequent rise of the TISZA Party from 2024 to 2025. The article asks how the party can establish itself as a leading challenger to Fidesz amid democratic backsliding. Drawing on process-tracing analysis, it demonstrates that the interaction and sequencing of opposition strategies constituted a key mechanism behind TISZA’s relative success in generating popular support in the context of electoral and informational autocracy. By specifying the timing and sequencing of opposition strategies, the findings show that factors of democratic resistance should be treated not as isolated variables but as interdependent processes whose order and timing shape opposition outcomes.
Disguised parties are electorally competitive organisations that preserve a mainstream label while durably advancing radical-right projects through programmatic shifts, institutional engineering and ecosystemic capture. We theorise disguise as a strategic equilibrium that widens electoral appeal and reduces reputational and regulatory costs by separating audiences and sequencing illiberal change through low-visibility instruments. The concept differs from mainstreaming, rebranding and episodic hardening by requiring a sustained divergence between public self-placement and governing practice and by combining multiple channels over time. We develop a portable identification checklist and a threefold typology and apply them in a within-case, theory-guided process tracing of Fidesz (1989–2025). The case shows how mainstream signalling can shield radical-right governance: It legitimises legalistic institutional redesign, facilitates information-environment capture and raises the costs of alternation and rollback. From this logic we derive testable expectations about enabling conditions, especially radical-right competition, permissive oversight in media and judicial arenas, and party-finance loopholes, and about downstream effects on opposition coordination and policy feedback. The argument reframes democratic-backsliding debates by highlighting mainstream enablers as a distinct regulatory problem and by motivating ex ante, structural safeguards.
This article analyses Czech textbooks and synthetic texts on the history of political thought in political science education. Using qualitative content and genre analysis, it distinguishes five models in the Czech textbook landscape: the chronological-canonical model, political science-didactic course notes, ideological-theoretical synthesis, philosophical-historical compendium and expansive-cataloguing textbook. The central diagnostic case is the new textbook by Valeš, Květina and Sekerák, which significantly broadens the Czech canon by including non-European traditions, feminism, African political thought, biopolitics, environmentalism and artificial intelligence. The article argues, however, that the expansion of content does not automatically solve the didactic and disciplinary problem. In the modern and contemporary section, the new textbook at times produces a catalogue of authors and themes rather than an interpretative architecture of political problems. The article concludes that Czech political science has moved from a problem of scarcity to a problem of structure.
Why did democratic backsliding reach fundamentally different depths in Hungary and Poland, two states that shared comparable institutional legacies, European Union membership and right-wing populist governments? This article argues that existing comparative accounts – centred on executive aggrandisement and electoral authoritarianism – are insufficient to explain this variation, because they overlook the decisive role of constitutional design and the specific legal strategy adopted by each governing party. Drawing on a novel analytical synthesis of 'abusive constitutionalism', 'legal populism' and 'stealth authoritarianism', the article demonstrates that Hungary's supermajority enabled a comprehensive constitutional overhaul that irreversibly restructured the conditions of political competition, whilst Poland's institutional architecture and fragmented opposition preserved sufficient democratic resilience to allow electoral reversal in 2023. The article further engages V-Dem longitudinal data (2010–2024) to trace the divergent trajectories empirically, and evaluates the EU's rule-of-law enforcement evolution across three phases: rhetorical condemnation, Article 7 proceedings and financial conditionality. The findings advance a 'constitutional threshold' theory of backsliding depth, with implications for comparative democratisation and EU institutional design.
Central Europe, long considered a model of successful post-communist democratic consolidation, has undergone a dramatic transformation in the early twenty-first century. This study analyses democratic backsliding in the Visegrád Group countries in the period 2023–2026, identifying four key mechanisms of autocratisation: media capture, the securitisation of political repression, the dismantling of institutional checks and economic state capture. The theoretical framework synthesises three complementary concepts: Scheppele’s autocratic legalism, explaining how democracy is dismantled through formally legal procedures; Innes’s theory of state capture, illuminating actor motivations; and Bermeo’s executive aggrandisement, describing its temporal dynamics. Košař and Šipulová’s typology of court-packing (expanding, emptying and swapping) supplies the operational tools. The study reveals marked variation: Hungary is a consolidated autocracy, Slovakia accelerated towards repression after the 2024 assassination attempt, Poland shows the difficulty of democratic restoration after the 2025 presidential election, while the Czech Republic exhibits signs of blocked hybridisation. The findings demonstrate that European integration alone cannot prevent backsliding once domestic safeguards are weakened, and that the principal weakness of the EU response lies not in a lack of instruments but in the political reluctance to deploy them. The study contributes a new hybrid model, ‘Digital Sovereign Corporatism’.
