Autocratization of Parliamentary Democracies: the Case of Hungary and Macedonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last decade, the democratic failure that appeared in parliamentary democracies in parts of post-communist Europe defies earlier expectations about democratic consolidation in that region. This doctoral dissertation develops an explanation for the question of why and how some new parliamentary democracies regress into authoritarianism. It analyzes the autocratization of two countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Hungary and Macedonia, that had previously been cited as “success stories” in their respective sub-regions. The question is addressed through a structured comparative analysis of post-communist political development in Hungary and Macedonia. The main argument developed in this study is two-fold. First, the analysis explains the way in which a democratic parliamentary system can transform itself into a particular form of authoritarianism—competitive authoritarianism. Second, it offers an explanation about the conditions under which autocratization occurred in the two countries. Autocratization transpired through both institutional and extra-institutional mechanisms. The institutional mechanisms included targeted legislative changes that undermined the democratic checks on executive power in the parliamentary system, without completely dismantling democratic institutions. The extra- institutional mechanisms included a targeted dismantling of civil society checks on executive power—through the co-optation or elimination of free and independent media, reconfiguration of the non-governmental sector and independent civil associations, as well as the take-over of business by the inner circles of the prime ministers. These cases demonstrate that a parliamentary democracy can transition into a non-democratic form of governance, regardless of the degree of its prior democratic consolidation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".