Rutger Claassen explores the moral dilemma that public servants face in increasingly authoritarian or illiberal states – should they resist illiberal pressures by the state, or continue to obey their states? The article presents a framework to interpret the pubic professional’s situation, characterizing it as a fiduciary relation, which is understood through the lens of Thomas Hobbes’ theory of authorization/representation. Claassen presents three models for understanding the public professional’s predicament, arguing in favor of the “constitutional model,” i.e., that public professionals have loyalty to constitutional principles. 

In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn argues that, faced with the realities of the 20th century, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror, Cold War liberal intellectuals transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals “redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs.” He pushes back against nostalgia for this era, increasingly appealing as a counter to contemporary illiberal values, calling instead for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy.

Evren Balta et al. chart the transition from populist to personalist authoritarian rule, noting that, while a growing body of research shows that populists draw on their mass support to weaken executive constraints, less attention has been given to what follows this populist turn. Balta et al. look to explain under what circumstances populists are able to leverage their mass support into authoritarian rule over the long term. Unlike other studies, they explain these transitions by examining how populist leaders manage other elites, i.e., they place the degree, timing, and nature of elite cohort replacement at the center of their theory.

The Politics of the Pandemic in Eastern Europe and Eurasia: Blame Game and Governance lays out the political impact of the COVID-19 emergency in central and eastern Europe and Eurasia, linking the Soviet past with patterns of political behavior and arguing that “domestic political regimes mediate and shape citizens’ perceptions of public health crises, and the very regimes’ political survival.” The authors explore the relationship between the pandemic and regime change, government stability, business groups, and civil society in over 15 countries, contributing to studies of governance in low-trust countries with authoritarian legacies and proclivities. 

In Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe, Larry M. Bartels argues that the contemporary populist moment “stems not from an increasingly populist public but from political leaders who exploit or mismanage the chronic vulnerabilities of democracy.” Bartels claims that, contrary to the demand-side notion of the “populist wave,” Europeans are no less populist than they were two decades ago; what has changed is that “conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power,” thus leading to democratic backsliding.  

Using Denmark as a case study, Cătălin-Gabriel Done unpacks how the rise of populism in Scandinavia led to a “change in the dynamics of the social composite” across the region. In particular, Done aims to reveal how the social anxiety of newcomers manifests itself interpersonally and interculturally. The author claims this is necessary in light of populist and Eurosceptic movements being consolidated in Denmark’s national and regional political life, noting that it is important to understand how populism influences social behavior if one wants to “anticipate possible countermeasures to anti-democratic and anti-liberal movements in the context of the perpetual development of the populist era.”

Flaminia Saccà and Donatella Selva study Viktor Orbán’s approach to the pandemic in Hungary. The authors contextualize Orbán’s pandemic performance by looking at his past performance, and his regime’s employment of a “permanent state of emergency,” a tactic used to gain new prerogatives and limit the role of parliament. Moreover, Orbán presents himself in hyper-masculine tones and frequently uses war metaphors to justify his policy choices. The authors argue that this resulted in the pandemic acting as an amplifier of populist leadership, accentuating the authoritarian drift.

Noting that political parties remain vital to contemporary democracies, Sema Akboga et al. examine the themes with which the five largest political parties in Turkey associate democracy. They find significant differences between the government bloc and the opposition bloc, along with differences among other alliances. The government bloc and People Alliance stress national will and military coups when referring to democracy while the opposition bloc and Nation Alliance emphasize themes such as equality, freedom of the press, and justice. The authors conclude that parties’ and blocs’ different attitudes towards democracy are indicators of political polarization in Turkey.

Manuela Caiani and Balša Lubarda focus on right-wing populists in power and their discourses and policy preferences on environmental issues, looking specifically at three cases: Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, and Lega in Italy. They aim to understand whether ideological or contextual factors (political opportunities) determine these parties’ positioning on the environment. They find that ideological differences are less important in determining these parties’ environmental discourses than opportunities and institutionalization. Moreover, they find that the shared features across these actors reflect a “conditional, ‘yes-but’ environmentalism of these parties, embedded in the discourse of ecological modernization and oppositional, Manichean framing.”

Orsolya Lehotai explores how gendered relations of power and masculinity are articulated and challenged in Hungary. The article examines how the Hungarian government constructs the illiberal state, negotiates its geopolitical position, and propagates illiberal values as “masculine” to articulate and assert its sovereignty against spheres of the “feminized” international, particularly against the West. In parallel with these processes, subnational competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty emerged between the Hungarian government and the mayor of Ásotthalom. By utilizing an intersectional analytical framework, this article maps how these competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty operate at the national and local levels, against the unfolding of the 2015 humanitarian crisis and its aftermath.

Stephen Deets probes the relationship between illiberal regimes and liberal officials at the local level, taking the example of Budapest’s mayor as a case study. He finds that, because illiberal populist regimes are “dense vertical networks,” opposition figures have to expand liberal democracy by relying on horizontal networks, doing so by increasing information, expanding participation, limiting the ruling party’s rent-seeking and clientelism, and (re)creating social solidarity. He also shows how illiberal central regimes respond to counter these measures. 

András Máté-Tóth and Zsófia Rakovics show how Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s thinking on religion and Christianity has evolved since 1990. They demonstrate how the concept of Christianity has changed in meaning in his speeches between 1990 and today, how it has been linked to political issues, and in what ways Orbán’s thinking has been similar to and different from political Christianity and religious Christianity. They argue that Orbán’s concept of Christianity can be understood as a “discursive struggle for political hegemony,” wherein Christianity is an empty signifier used to construct the populist “people” or “nation.” They describe Hungarian society as “collectively wounded,” and therefore requiring an “overarching narrative symbolizing unity, of which Christianity is a key concept.”

Tomáš Dvořák and Jan Zouhar identify and expound on the contextual drivers of support for populist parties in the post-communist Czech Republic and eastern Germany. Based on a large sample of voters they identify economic hardship and demographic decline as important contextual factors in the rise of populism, wrapping these up into a theory of “regional peripheralization,” a process that exacerbates socio-economic disparities and affects voting behavior and the support for political parties. 

Using Poland as a case study, Adrienne Sörbom and Katarzyna Jezierska investigate the impact of polarization in civil society, developing a framework for analyzing social capital in a polarized context. The article identifies practices that organizations may engage in when shaping social capital and working with others, showing how different actors either integrate relations within the so-called “poles” or separate relations between them. The article thus shows how social capital contributes to intensified polarization.

Adam Sykes analyzes how Russian President Vladimir Putin characterized liberalism between his return to power in 2012 and the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Sykes contends that, over this decade, Putin consistently positioned himself as a moderate critic of Western liberalism as opposed to an uncompromising ideologue. To demonstrate this tendency, the article examines two prominent Russian state television personalities – Dmitrii Kiselev and Vladimir Solov’ev – who have used strident rhetoric in describing Western liberalism, notably after the 2014 crisis in Ukraine.

Gráinne de Búrca and Katharine G. Young trace the unraveling of a decades-long effort to develop a normative consensus on human rights, describing examples emanating from Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Bolsanaro’s Brazil, the United States under the former Trump Administration, and more. The authors describe these developments as “misappropriations” – the use of human rights language in the service of exclusionary, repressive, or anti-pluralist ends, or in the service of reversing previous commitments or evading external monitoring or accountability. They also track recent moves towards transnational coordination of nationalist, populist, right-wing, and authoritarian movements. The analyses from various jurisdictions worldwide focus on attempts to remake and reverse a range of progressive achievements of the human rights system around gender, religion, property, culture, and equality. 

Failed Democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean: Democratic Purgatory and the Viability of Consolidated Democratic Regimes introduces the new concept of “purgatory democracy” and compares and contrasts experiences of democratic failure across the region, looking specifically at Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua. The implications of the present research on democratic purgatory have real-world applications not only for the above countries but also for those political systems that are currently transitioning and/or consolidating their democracies as well.

Lisandro E. Claudio unpacks the paradoxical presidency of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr in the Philippines. While many worried that his victory would mean a deeper slide into illiberalism, especially because of his family ties to the dictatorship and his connections to the outgoing populist President Rodrigo Duterte, he has governed with relative moderation, repairing relations with the United States, pulling back on Duterte’s brutal drug war and persecution of critics, and restoring a sense of bureaucratic stability and normalcy.