CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Hradicky, Jan |
|---|---|
| Title | Explaining Diverging Paths: Democratic Backsliding in the Context of Democratic Inoculation in Central Europe |
| Summary | Does a polity learn from the past period of democratic backsliding? Democratic backsliding is often understood as a regional trend in current Central and Eastern Europe, but this trend does not apply to the case of Slovakia. This thesis argues that it is because of democratic inoculation - Slovak experience with the hybrid regime of Vladimír Mečiar in the 1990s that made Slovak democracy more persistent against democratic backsliding. Theory-building process tracing is equipped to trace this democratic inoculation through three mechanisms, namely, the awareness of the threats to democracy, the creation of specific symbols and parallels, and the popularity of democracy. Quantitative text analysis of journalistic resources and the public opinion polls are used to operationalize these processes. To refine the theory of democratic inoculation, the case of Serbia is analyzed as well. Serbia has also overcome a period of a hybrid regime in the 1990s that was similar to the case of Slovakia. However, unlike Slovakia, Serbia started to backslide significantly after 2012, therefore, the democratic inoculation was not successful in this case. The empirical part of the thesis offers strong evidence for the theorized processes. It is also argued that democratic inoculation did not work in Serbia due to the lack of polarization and the stalled reforms in the post-Milošević era. |
| Supervisor | Schneider, Carsten Q. |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/hradicky_jan.pdf |
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