Ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding in Central Europe

Abstract

Ethnopopulism is an elite strategy for winning votes and concentrating power–a common playbook for the erosion of liberal democracy that is empowered and justified by a companion playbook of ethnopopulist and majoritarian appeals. Ethnopopulism is flexible with the truth, and flexible in identifying friends and enemies of “the people”. Ethnopopulist parties manipulate opposition to neo-liberal economic policies and racialize the immigrant threat. Democratic backsliding has unexpectedly taken hold in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the very factors that seemed to augur well for liberal democracy may have contained the seeds of its degradation at the hands of ethnopopulist leaders.