Abstract
The focus of this chapter lies in the foggy area of states that are not democratic enough to be counted as best examples of full democracies, but at the same time are not authoritarian enough to be considered hybrid regimes or full dictatorships. In the article, we contrast the rule of law to the rule of man, to distinguish power and attempts to restrict or limit it. Our cases, or rather examples, come from recent developments in the United States and Hungary, countries not usually juxtaposed, but in which political actors have recently found more and more common denominators. The cases are linked to political cultures and contextualized with two notable global indices, namely Democracy Index and the Rule of Law Index. Thus, the approach is dealing with a phenomenon, which we call ‘politics of indifference’, in which one does whatever is possible to do in order to advance one’s own ambitions and obstructing the opposing groups. This phenomenon can be seen as a by-product of strong enough political power, and ultimately authoritarianism is not the only rival of liberal democracy, but democracy itself.
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Notes
- 1.
The rule of law can be, in a broad understanding, seen simply as ‘playing by the rules’, whereas the rule of man is more akin to the aphorism ‘might makes right’; some do things by the book, while others do whatever they can get away with. The latter term is also remarkably apt in the case of Orwell’s text, as after the revolution the pigs leading the farm eventually begin to behave more and more like humans.
- 2.
For example, Jaakko Husa (2018) has made a distinction between rule of law and rule by law, when depicting the system of power in Communist China.
- 3.
The other two are ‘appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”…and crisis, breakdown or threat’ (Moffitt, 2016, p. 8).
- 4.
Admittedly, this concept has already been used in other contexts and fields of study, such as sociology and anthropology. In a political context, the concept has been used in relation to minority politics and refugee/migration politics (see, e.g., Fernando, 2019; Kukathas, 1998). However, we use this concept as political scientists in the context of International Relations by giving it a novel interpretation, which is connected directly to the unorthodox approaches to democracy and the limits of power. In our interpretation, the term indifference is understood as not caring about something, disregarding something, or even contemning something.
- 5.
The similarities between various ideologies, viewpoints and policies in Hungary and the United States have, however, not gone totally unnoticed. For example, the Washington Post recently published a three-part analysis under the title The Orbanization of America (Tharoor, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). The articles claimed—among many things—that ‘[t]he Hungarian prime minister and his ruling Fidesz party has become a prominent source of inspiration for American conservatives’ and that ‘[t]o right-wingers in the United States, steeped in anti-liberal grievance, Hungary offers a glimpse of culture war victory and a template for action’. The New York Times has also written about this matter under the title ‘How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary’ (Zerofsky, 2021). From an academic perspective, Cas Mudde (2022) has written about the similarities of Orbánian and Trumpian politics. This connection was even further strengthened by the appearance—not to mention the rather contentious speech—of Viktor Orbán at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas in August 2022 (Orbán, 2022).
- 6.
‘The government as well as private actors are accountable under the law; The laws are clear, publicized, and stable; are applied evenly; and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and contract, property, and human rights; The processes by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced are accessible, fair, and efficient; Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and independent representatives and neutrals who are accessible, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve’ (World Justice Project, 2022a, p. 14).
- 7.
Already in 2018, Freedom House stated that ‘Seventy-one countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only thirty-five registering gains. This marked the twelfth consecutive year of decline in global freedom’ (Freedom House, 2018).
- 8.
Naturally, it should be noted that this sort of data cannot be used to compare one state to another, but it does reveal the general picture about the state of democracy, or, in other words, it tells us where the most common problems of democracy currently are. Another important issue is that listing only the worst scores does not mean that the other four sectors would necessarily be much better, in some cases the second to worst category is second just barely, and the further down the list we go, the lower the overall score is. For example, in the case of the authoritarian regimes, some dispersion to the numbers starts to appear as more and more states have the same lowest score in several categories, Syria at the bottom here, with a score of 0.00 in three separate categories since the 2015 index. The only similar cases are Chad between 2006 and 2010 and Myanmar in 2022. Therefore, it is not fruitful to try to compare the scores, because obviously the states higher on the list tend to have higher scores in all five categories than the states near the bottom of the list. What this exercise shows, however, is the relative performance of any given state’s society and especially the problem—or grey—areas of that state’s democratic performance.
- 9.
The diagrams in Fig. 8.2 have been formulated by comparing all the states that are found annually in both indexes between 2012 and 2022 and by combining the scores of the Rule of Law Index with those of the Democracy Index. We have used the latest data set available from the World Justice Project (2022b), covering the years between 2012–2013 and 2022. The Rule of Law Index scores states on a scale of zero to one, while the Democracy Index uses a scale of zero to ten, which allows an easy conversion to achieve proportionality. However, as the Rule of Law Index does not classify states into different groups based on their scores per se, we have applied a similar division of scores that is found in the Democracy Index (Full Democracies 10–8, Flawed Democracies 8–6, Hybrid Regimes 6–4 and Authoritarian Regimes 4–0) to the scores on the Rule of Law Index, which we have, in a rather simplistic manner, named Rule of Law (1–0.8), Flawed Rule of Law (0.8–0.6), Hybrid Rule of Law (0.6–0.4) and finally Rule of Man (0.4–0). The results are presented as a percentage of states belonging to these four different categories. Simply put, these diagrams endeavour to show how do the four groups of states of the Democracy Index fare in the Rule of Law Index; in some sense this division can be described as a decreasing continuum from rule of law towards rule of man. Yet, this sort of almost coercive comparison does not fully take into account the many differences between these two indexes and their result (such as the number of states surveyed, the criteria and methodology used etc.). Ultimately, this comparison is mainly offered as an illustration of the complex nature between rule of law and democracy.
- 10.
The highest score for Singapore’s rule of law is 0.82 in 2015 and 6.38 for democracy in 2016 and 2018. The lowest scores are the current 2022 score of 0.78 and 5.88 in 2012; in fact, Singapore was classified as a hybrid regime until 2014 (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2022, p. 16; World Justice Project, 2022b).
- 11.
- 12.
In fact, a recent report on the state of democracy by International IDEA (2021, pp. 6–8) defines the United States as a ‘declining democracy’, along with Hungary and Poland. Overall, the report demonstrates the global decay of democracy, both quantitatively and qualitatively, ‘More than a quarter of the world’s population now live in democratically backsliding countries. Together with those living in outright non-democratic regimes, they make up more than two-thirds of the world’s population’ (International IDEA, 2021, p. vii).
- 13.
Furthermore, after the 2020 elections and the victory of President Biden, a staggering number of states have proposed or already enacted legislation that could restrict or supress votes and disenfranchise voters even more than is already the case (see Brennan Center for Justice, 2021, 2022). In comparison, writing about authoritarian rulers, Schedler (2002, p. 44) concluded that they ‘may devise registration methods, identification requirements, and voting procedures that are universal in form but systematically discriminatory in practice. In addition, they may manipulate the voter rolls, illicitly adding or deleting names, or bar voters from polling stations on trumped-up legal or technical grounds’. It is rather distressing to notice that many of these proposed measures seem to fall into one of the mechanisms—manipulating elections strategically to be exact—of democratic backsliding proposed by Nancy Bermeo (2016, pp. 13–14).
- 14.
The Unites States performs considerably worse in the categories of functioning of the government (II = 6.43 in 2022) and political culture (IV = 6.25 in 2022), than it does in the other three; in fact, the sub-scores in all the other categories have either remained relatively stable (a score of 9.17 in category I for over a decade and back to 8.53 in category V after a small decline between 2015 and 2019) or even improved recently (III = 7.22 in 2018 and 8.89 in 2022). While category I, which is related to elections, has a very good score in the US case, even in this category there is a certain amount of ambivalence involved. According to Graham and Svolik (2020, p. 406) the ‘Distortions of the democratic process long abandoned by most democracies—especially gerrymandering and the partisan administration and adjudication of elections—remain constitutional in the United States’ (cf. also Barber & McCarty, 2015, pp. 51–52). Furthermore, in 2021, the United States Senate, or the 50 Republican Senators to be precise, managed to thwart a comprehensive federal election bill, proposed by the Democrats (see, e.g., Levine & Montellaro, 2021).
- 15.
- 16.
Jackson’s tenure, however, did not begin until 30 June, so she did not take part in the controversial 5–4 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on 24 June 2022 (Hurley & Chung, 2022).
- 17.
For a description of the attitudes of various segments of the US society towards several of these ‘key issues’, see Castle and Stepp (2021).
- 18.
In addition, the questions of race and racism are naturally always present in the politics of the United States. Indeed, the rise of various right-wing movements can be seen partly as a counter-reaction to the Obama era or as an answer to the perceived deterioration of traditional white America. In fact, the presence of ‘racial/ethnic resentment’ is a very important factor in explaining the distribution of votes in the 2016 presidential elections (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2019, pp. 138–139, 145–146).
- 19.
Anne Applebaum even accused Orbán, on Twitter, of establishing the first dictatorship in the European Union (the tweet is available at: https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1244628276418617346).
- 20.
There have been even more questionable occasions, such as the declaring of a ‘special economic zone’ in the opposition-run city of Göd, thus ‘depriving the city of 40% of its income’ and the governmental takeover of a packaging manufacturer, in which the Hungarian state was already a stakeholder and ‘embroiled in a legal dispute with the minority owners’ (Győry & Weinberg, 2020, pp. 344–345; Mészáros, 2021, p. 89).
- 21.
This long tale of the uninterrupted state of emergency in Hungary stretched on even further. In the spring of 2022, the government decided that the pandemic state of emergency would not be extended, and it would end on 1 June. However, already in late May, a new state of emergency was declared, this time because of the war in Ukraine, made possible by a new amendment of the constitution, introduced only a few weeks earlier (see, e.g., Coakley, 2022; Dunai, 2022; Mészáros, 2021, pp. 86–87). In July 2022, Hungary also declared a state of emergency over rising energy prices (Euronews, 2022).
- 22.
In the United States, the weak initial responses to the pandemic together with prior policy decisions have resulted in catastrophic consequences, perhaps even bordering on extreme indifference towards the well-being of the nation. According to the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, ‘Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic…has caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths’ (Woolhandler et al., 2021, pp. 707–708). Already in February 2021, the death toll had exceeded 500,000 people, a number comparable to the casualties of both World Wars and Vietnam combined, and in June 2021 the number of deaths had exceeded 600,000. By the summer of 2022, the number of deaths had exceeded one million in the United States (21st in deaths per million people), and over 46,000 in Hungary (fourth in deaths per million people) (Bosman, 2021; Ellerbeck & Winfield Cunningham, 2021; OWID, 2022, for up-to-date statistics, see Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/).
- 23.
The essence of the Fidesz rule has been, according to Győry and Weinberg (2020, p. 334), ‘to create an uneven playing field which systematically disadvantages the opposition to the extent that their path to power is blocked, even if elections remain competitive and free of outright fraud such as ballot-stuffing or disenfranchisement’.
- 24.
In Hungary, the polarization is ‘elite driven’ and focused mainly on the ‘religious–secular and nationalist–cosmopolitan divides, rather than economic or social ones’ (McCoy et al., 2018, p. 27). As a result, Hungary can be regarded as ‘one of the most polarized polities in Europe’ (Vegetti, 2019, p. 80).
- 25.
On the matter and problems of naming political systems, see Nyyssönen and Metsälä (2022).
- 26.
All citizens receive a letter with a questionnaire that includes an introduction and options to usually around ten questions.
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Metsälä, J., Nyyssönen, H. (2023). The Grey Areas of Democracy: Indifference and the Erosion of Democratic Principles from Within. In: Lagerspetz, E., Pulkkinen, O. (eds) Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41397-1_8
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