Zoltán Ádám, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

Hungary under Orbán: The EU’s Only Electoral Autocracy in Comparative Perspective

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz gained a two-thirds constitutional majority in the 2010 parliamentary elections, and Hungary subsequently entered a period of accelerating autocratization. My ambition for my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin is to complete a book on this process: its underlying reasons, enabling factors, most important elements, and consequences. For this process, paradoxically, made Hungary as important on the global stage as it has not been since the revolution of 1956.
In this spectacular process of autocratization, the governing parliamentary majority gradually gained power over the judiciary and all other formally independent agencies and public institutions—among others, the office of the chief prosecutor, the state accounting office, the public television and radio, and the public news agency. As the number of independent agencies shrank, public space was increasingly filled with government propaganda, often in the form of hate speech against government-designated scapegoats, including migrants and refugees, civil society organizations, the EU, the IMF, the UN, and George Soros. In 2019, in consequence, Hungary was classified as partly free by Freedom House (FH), which was the first time an EU member state was ever given this classification. Similarly, since 2020, the V-Dem Institute has classified Hungary an electoral autocracy, again for the first time for any EU member state. Nevertheless, the roots of the dramatic post-2010 Hungarian democratic decline should be sought in the pre-2010 period. Why, how, and with which specific consequences are the subject of my book.

Recommended Reading

Ádám, Zoltán (2019). “Explaining Orbán: A Political Transaction Cost Theory of Authoritarian Populism.” Problems of Post-Communism 66 (6): 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2019.1643249.
— (2020). “Re-feudalizing Democracy: An Approach to Authoritarian Populism Taken from Institutional Economics.” Journal of Institutional Economics 16 (1): 105–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137419000304.
— (2023). “Economic Versus Authoritarian: Economic and Social Policies of Alternating Populisms in Pre- and Post-2010 Hungary.” In Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century, edited by Joseph Chacko Chennattuserry, Madhumati Deshpande, and Paul Hong. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9859-0_11-1.

Kolloquium, 06.01.2026

Taking stock of autocratization in Hungarian semi-privatized universities: Reconceptualizing academic freedom as an anti-populist democratic counter-strategy

In this research project, which lays the conceptual foundations for my post-Wiko project in Hungary, I focus on the functions and potential roles of academic freedom in a moment when liberal democracy appears to be universally endangered by democratically legitimized authoritarian populism. The project is informed by the case of post-2010 Hungary; one of the clearest examples of authoritarian populism, or in the words of Fareed Zakaria and Viktor Orbán: illiberal democracy. Hungary not only offers a point of reference as an autocratizing political regime, but also shows how academic governance is transformed in such a regime to serve the interests of those in power, i.e. political and business elites. Such an institutional transformation implies considerable risks not only for individual academics (like me), but also for academia as a whole in terms of deteriorating institutional performances and potential exclusion from international scientific networks, particularly those situated in the EU. The underlying reason for institutional underperformance is not merely the dominance of political loyalties: it is the replacement of collaborative, inclusive, bottom-up strategies with more hierarchical, exclusionary, top-down organizational principles. (Note that authoritarian populism itself is a hierarchical, exclusionary, top-down approach to power.) The resulting institutional decay in politically controlled, semi-privatized Hungarian universities can over time weaken regime legitimacy among the middle classes—a crucially important pro-regime constituency. In consequence, the old autocratic trade-off between political control and systemic efficiency is recreated; the one that had played a key role in delegitimizing East European communism in the first place before it collapsed 35 years ago. (Note the similar trends of institutional decay in public childcare and professional football; two sources of endless political frustrations in Hungary.) The underlying research interests of the project are (1) taking stock of the costs and benefits of politically controlled, autocratizing universities for political and business elites as well as the general public and (2) reconceptualizing academic freedom as an anti-populist democratic counter-strategy.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Ádám, Zoltán (Cambridge, 2020)

Re-feudalizing democracy : an approach to authoritarian populism taken from institutional economics

Ádám, Zoltán (Abingdon, Oxon, 2019)

Explaining Orbán : a political transaction cost theory of authoritarian populism