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“Strongmen” Don't Redistribute:Illiberal Leaders on the Right and Worsening Economic Inequality
No full textIlliberal leaders—sometimes called strongmen—often campaign on being more effective. The tradeoff presented to citizens is straightforward: they promise to cut through the indecisiveness and gridlock of democratic debate and give people what they want. Such leaders often use the rhetoric of economic grievances, corruption, and redistribution, but do they follow through on those promises? We answer this question using data from 38,557 speeches by 381 leaders in 120 countries between 1998 and 2024, combined with economic indicators from the World Bank and V-Dem measures on regime type and resource inequality. Utilizing a machine learning approach, we employ BERT language models that place leaders’ speeches on two continuous dimensions measuring liberal–illiberal speech and left–right economic positions. We test whether illiberals are more effective at translating their economic preferences into material changes. We show that illiberal leaders do deliver the goods—but only when they are on the economic right and only in the direction of greater economic inequality. Illiberals resemble populists because they engage in the rhetoric of cultural exclusion, but they do not push a distributional policy that benefits most citizens. The policy preferences of illiberal leftists, on the other hand, have no apparent effect. This article makes methodological contributions by building a one-dimensional scale for measuring the economic left–right positions of political leaders. This article also contributes to our understanding of the pernicious effects of illiberal leaders in deepening economic inequality
The dual state of judiciary in Hungary and Poland
No full textHollowing out of the independent judiciary is at the center of systematic rule of law violations of illiberal regimes. In Hungary and Poland, courts and judges had been subject to political pressure, tactics of institutional paralysis, and personnel removal as ruling parties have attempted judicial capture. Incumbents change the rules of the game, take over institutions deciding on the legality of elections or the persecution of opponents. Some of the judges have resisted, others succumbed to political pressure and still others have built their careers in the autocratizing state. To better understand these autocratic dynamics within the judiciary, we adopt the concept of the dual state (Fraenkel) that postulates that authoritarian changes do not penetrate institutions all at once. Rather, there is a dynamic of capture and resistance between the political and the independent parts of the judiciary. We argue that in both countries a dual state of the judiciary has developed. The duality within the judicial system of illiberal regimes translates into the bifurcation of the normative state vs. the prerogative state, which however does not lead to parallel legal orders. Instead, within the same system, two governmental principles compete: the normative state follows laws and resists the politicization of judicial decision-making, whereas the prerogative state applies authoritarian logic and instrumentalizes law to meet political expectations. The concept of dual state of judiciary helps in exploring rule of law violations that instead of judicially securing politics, politicize the judiciary. We show that while the normative state of the judiciary is almost extinct in Hungary and persists mainly with the help of the EU, Poland’s new government has embarked on dismantling the prerogative state of the judiciary, a complex process that might take longer than expected
