Commissioned Book Review: András Körösényi, Gábor Illés and Attila Gyulai, The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in the Making
| Author | Renáta Ryoko Drávucz |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211063743 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) NP19 –NP20
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1063743PSW0010.1177/14789299211063743Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
research-article2021
Commissioned Book Review
The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader
Democracy in the Making by András
Körösényi, Gábor Illés and Attila Gyulai.
London: Routledge, 2020, 202 pp., £120.00
(hardback); £33.29 (ebook), ISBN 9780367147907.
Our global political arena has undergone some
serious changes in the past few decades. We
have seen the rise of several political actors
who did not fit in the previously dominant par-
adigm of liberal democracy, challenging our
thoughts, sometimes of democracy itself. As a
reaction to these, plenty of scientific articles
have been written under the labels of “pop-
ulism,” “democratic backlash”—and its differ-
ent synonyms, the birth of “hybrid regimes” or
“semi-dictatorships” and so on. These labels
have all tried to reflect on these changes from
the perspective of liberal democracy, assessing
contemporary regimes based on how liberal
and democratic they are on a one-dimensional
linear scale. As these labels have failed to
explain the aforementioned phenomena fully,
the authors offer the new theoretical model of
“plebiscitary leader democracy” (PLD), build-
ing on the work of Max Weber. They use the
illustrative case of Hungary and Viktor Orbán
to present their theory, which—unlike other
approaches—considers both discursive and
structural elements.
The Orbán regime’s analysis begins in 2010.
After introducing the concept and analytical
framework of PLD, the authors proceed to intro-
duce the Orbán regime itself: its pre-history,
context, and politics. They continue with pre-
senting the structural elements: how the regime
has rebuilt the polity by constitutional tinkering
and institutional reorganization and how they
abuse public policy by clientelist etatism, selec-
tive responsiveness, and ideological bricolage.
Despite Viktor Orbán being the country’s prime
minister between 1998 and 2002, labeling him
as an illustration of populism, illiberalism, and a
drift toward authoritarianism only appeared
after he took power for the second time in 2010.
Since then, Hungarian politics have often been
at the center of attention in the media and aca-
demia. The two most prominent existing expla-
nations regarding Hungarian politics have been
populism and “the regime classification para-
digm.” In the case of the populism approach,
populism is usually perceived as ideology or
discourse, overall leaving structural, regime-
level elements without explanation and disre-
garding the transformation of democracy.
Furthermore, as the authors argue, mainstream
populism literature does not consider that pop-
ulism emerged as a polar opposite to techno-
cratic politics, making them unable to understand
the essence of Hungarian politics and leaving us
with only partial explanations. The proponents
of the other approach, the regime classification
paradigm, have labeled post-2010 Hungary as a
country experiencing a democratic backslide
currently being between democracy and author-
itarianism. The starting point of this hybrid
regime literature is the ideal of liberal democ-
racy: it compares actual regimes with liberal
democratic standards. Therefore, its focus is on
the lack of some features rather than on existing
characteristics, leaving out potential endoge-
nous explanations and broader political trends.
In contrast to these mainstream interpreta-
tions, the authors of this book propose “plebi-
scitary leader democracy” (PLD) as an
alternative analytical approach for understand-
ing Hungarian politics. As defined by them, a
PLD is a political regime that relies on charis-
matic legitimacy and contains personalist,
authoritarian and democratic features as well.
While considering the previously mentioned
approaches, they try to provide a broader per-
spective by considering current political trends,
such as the diminishing role of parties, media-
tization, or personalization—which altogether
have undermined the previously dominant
party democracy. The ideal-type concept of
PLD can be best understood as a political
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