User:Piotr Marczyński/sandbox

The term backsliding and the entire debate surrounding it hinges on the assessment of the level of consolidation in the region before recent attempts of executive aggrandizement. In this view, the installment of liberal democratic institutions, combined with the free-market reforms, was a successful endeavor that resulted in the creation of the consolidated liberal democracies in the region. This stance emphasizes the procedural aspect of democracy, focusing on the maintenance of a liberal institutional framework. Backsliding is portrayed here, as an elite-led process with the analysis focused on individuals in control of the executive, who derail liberal-democratic institutions in quest for more power. In this strand of thought, cases of Hungary and Poland are put forward, as the prime examples of this tendency, often pointing out to too lax rule of law enforcement of the European Union is the necessary condition for its occurrence The optimistic view of the regional democratic consolidation passing “making authoritarian reversal inconceivable” has been discredited in the field.

Dismantling of liberal institutions by governments in the region increased doubts regarding the level of democratization before the recent executive aggrandizement efforts. This line of argument has a long tradition in the field of post-communist studies. Leninist legacy paradigm focused on the continuities of undemocratic practices in the communist system, with the primary attention given to the illiberal political culture. This trope was picked up by scholars who emphasized the participatory aspect of democracy, either by pointing out to the inactiveness of civil society or criticizing its "uncivil" character. This paradigm incorporates various approaches from the historical inquires to the politico-economic analysis, connected by seeing the dwindling of the liberal democratic institutions, as a symptom rather than the illness itsel f. It can be associated with the "hollowing out" approach of explaining de-democratization, focused on the bottom-up causes.

Another pivotal aspect of the backsliding debate concerns the extent to which the phenomenon represents the regional trend in the CEE. There is a growing doubt if Hungary and Poland are representative of the de-democratization trajectory in the region, with the increasing calls for incorporating other country cases. At first, focusing on these cases seems natural, as they represent the sharpest drop in the level of democracy in the region. However, the decisive majority of the Law and Justice party in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary allows for a regionally unique mode of the top-down dismantling of liberal democratic institutions.

The most prominent effort to differentiate between Poland and Hungary and the rest of CEE, while acknowledging the undergoing of the common trend of de-democratization is the classification of illiberal turns and swerves. Swerving describes temporal drawbacks in democratization visible across the region, whilst illiberal turn refers to systemic backsliding in Hungary and partially to Poland This approach allows for the macro-regional analysis while leaving the room for analyzing the country-specific democratic challenges. Looking “beyond Poland and Hungary” brought a wide array of country-case studies, covering unique democratic trajectories of Slovenia, Czech Republic ,Slovakia , West Balkans and Baltic States. The current challenge in the field is to aggregate insights from the case-studies into the macro-theory explaining the variance in the forms of backsliding in the region.