Papers by Lenka Bustikova
Political Analysis
When do parties respond to their political rivals and when do they ignore them? This article pres... more When do parties respond to their political rivals and when do they ignore them? This article presents a new computational framework to detect, analyze and predict partisan responsiveness by showing when parties on opposite poles of the political spectrum react to each other’s agendas and thereby contribute to polarization. Once spikes in responsiveness are detected and categorized using latent Dirichlet allocation, we utilize the terms that comprise the topics, together with a gradient descent solver, to assess the classifier’s predictive accuracy. Using 10,597 documents from the official websites of radical right and ethnic political parties in Slovakia (2004–2014), the analysis predicts which political issues will elicit partisan reactions, and which will be ignored, with an accuracy of 83% (F-measure) and outperforms both Random Forest and Naive Bayes classifiers. Subject matter experts validate the approach and interpret the results.
This thematic issue, "Varieties of Technocratic Populism around the World," investigates ideologi... more This thematic issue, "Varieties of Technocratic Populism around the World," investigates ideological origins of technocratic populism and situates it among other types of populism. It is composed of 11 articles that bring together 18 scholars from around the world with a wide variety of perspectives. Technocratic populism is an output-oriented populism that directly links voters to leaders via expertise. It emerges as a response to a crisis of governance, reproaches mainstream parties for it and offers solutions that challenge traditional left-right divisions in politics. New leaders combine populism with tech-nocracy: They offer expertise, often harnessed in business, but also a direct, personalized link to 'ordinary' citizens. Above all, they politicize expertise to gain legitimacy. Technocratic populism primarily responds to frustrations of the electorate with poor governance, not to nativist grievances or to the plight of the most vulnerable citizens. In a new social contract, it is expected that voters renounce politics and political parties and that they turn into spectators who observe how techno-cratic elites adopt solutions that benefit the 'ordinary people.' Technocratic populism is a growing challenge to pluralistic forms of representative democracy and calls for further scholarly attention.
Best in Covid: Populists in the Time of Pandemic, 2020
How do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocra... more How do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocratic populists in power during the first wave of the novel coronavirus crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We identify three features of the populist pandemic response. First, populists bypassed established, institutionalized channels of crisis response. Second, they engaged in erratic yet responsive policy making. These two features are ubiquitous to populism. The third feature, specific to technocratic populism, is the politicization of expertise in order to gain legitimacy. Technocratic populists in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia weaponized medical expertise for political purposes.
The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years ... more The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of doing so, it focuses on four specific issues: volatility, sequencing, a shift from nationalism (group) to social conservatism (grid), and on the radicalisation of mainstream parties. Volatility is tied to the ebb and flow of shifts in the status quo associated with minority accommodation, which elucidates both why radical right mobilisation accelerates and why it loses steam. The expansion of minority rights leads to political 'extreme reactions'. Sequencing matters since minority accommodation coincided with democratisation in Eastern Europe, so the struggle over minority rights is confounded with a concurrent regime change. Shifts from group to grid refer to the recent rise in socially conservative issues as sources of polarisation. Finally, extremist parties can threaten democratic pluralism. Nevertheless, large radicalised mainstream parties that control parliaments, not small extremist parties, subvert the institutions of democratic oversight. The threat originates from the mainstream and is exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracy has not 'locked in' in most of Eastern Europe.
Political Analysis, 2020
When do parties respond to their political rivals and when do they ignore them? This article pres... more When do parties respond to their political rivals and when do they ignore them? This article presents a new computational framework to detect, analyze and predict partisan responsiveness by showing when parties on opposite poles of the political spectrum react to each other’s agendas and thereby contribute to polarization. Once spikes in responsiveness are detected and categorized using latent Dirichlet allocation, we utilize the terms that comprise the topics, together with a gradient descent solver, to assess the classifier’s predictive accuracy. Using 10,597 documents from the official websites of radical right and ethnic political parties in Slovakia (2004–2014), the analysis predicts which political issues will elicit partisan reactions, and which will be ignored, with an accuracy of 83% (F-measure) and outperforms both Random Forest and Naive Bayes classifiers. Subject matter experts validate the approach and interpret the results.
East European Politics, 2020
This article explores the mechanisms of accommodation and backlash against a new identity group i... more This article explores the mechanisms of accommodation and backlash against a new identity group in the Czech Republic and Slovakia-LGBT. Minority demands spark political backlash because societal consensus lags behind the actual accommodation of sexual minorities. The legal framework of the European Union and international pressure groups further accelerate the process of accommodation and polarisation. Yesterday's accommodation in Western Europe is today's demand in Eastern Europe. The common European framework erodes the grip of domestic elites on minority rights and contributes to backlash by social conservative forces.
In einem bemerkenswerten Artikel, der in der American Political Science Review erschien, bezeichn... more In einem bemerkenswerten Artikel, der in der American Political Science Review erschien, bezeichnete der schweizerische Politikwissenschaftler Daniele Caramani Populismus und Technokratie als zwei Entwicklungen, die aktuell die repräsentative Demokratie herausfordern und sie gefährden (Caramani, 2017). Diese wird als effektive und legitime Form der Herrschaft anerkannt, weil in ihr politische Entscheidungen letztlich aus einem Wettbewerb hervorgehen, in dem unterschiedliche Vorstellungen darüber, was das Gemeinwohl bedeutet und wie es zu verwirklichen ist, zur Auswahl stehen. Technokraten behaupten dagegen, diese Fragen aufgrund von fachlichen Kenntnissen und wissenschaftlichen Verfahren beantworten zu können, also als Experten bestimmen zu können, welche Politik dem Gemeinwohl entspricht. Populismus wiederum beruht auf der Annahme, dass sich das Gemeinwohl im Willen eines Volkes äußere, und dass man daher nur diesen Volkswillen unverfälscht, ohne die Verzerrung durch Eliten oder intermediäre Prozesse, bestimmen müsse. Während Technokratie auf einem Missverständnis von Wissenschaft beruht, liegt dem Populismus ein falsches Verständnis von Demokratie zugrunde. Wissenschaft erzeugt keine Wahrheiten, sondern nur Wahrheitsbehauptungen, die unter dem Vorbehalt einer möglichen Falsifizierung stehen. Demokratie bedeutet nicht Herrschaft des Volkes, sondern Herrschaft unter dem Vorbehalt, dass sie gegenüber dem Volk verantwortet werden kann und von einer Mehrheit der Bürgerinnen und Bürger unterstützt wird. Dass Wissenschaft und Demokratie eng zusammenhängen, darauf haben Karsten Fischer und Peter Strohschneider in überzeugender Weise hingewiesen (Fischer, Strohschneider, 2017). In beiden Bereichen gelten Erkenntnisse und Entscheidungen nur vorläufig als richtig, und auch dies nur, wenn sie der Überprüfung und Kritik ausgesetzt werden und wenn diejenigen, die für sie verantwortlich sind, sie rechtfertigen. Wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse sind also nur unter der Bedingung der Revidierbarkeit gültig. Daher können Experten zwar für politische Entscheidungen Wissen und Argumente liefern, aber das politische Entscheiden nicht überflüssig machen. Entscheidungen über politische Angelegenheiten müssen in demokratischen Verfahren legitimiert werden und stehen in der Demokratie selbst unter dem Vorbehalt der Revidierbarkeit.
East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
Why, when, and how does populism emerge in a stable democracy? This article investigates the poli... more Why, when, and how does populism emerge in a stable democracy? This article investigates the political logic and ideological appeal of a rarely explored form of populism: technocratic populism. Technocratic populism uses the appeal of technical expertise to connect directly with the people, promising to run the state as a firm, while at the same time delegitimizing political opponents and demobilizing the electorate by instilling civic apathy. Technocratic populism is an anti-elite ideology that exploits competence to create the appearance of authenticity and proximity to ordinary people. It is less exclusionary than nativist or economic forms of populisms and its broad appeal is therefore arguably more threatening to representative democracy. In order to understand the appeal of technocratic populism, as well as why it arises at critical junctures
when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical
roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional
left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from
communist-era populist campaigns against “elitist” dissidents (from Charter 77) in the
Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also
adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting.
The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political
regimes.
What explains the success and failure of radical right parties over time and across countries? Th... more What explains the success and failure of radical right parties over time and across countries? This article presents a new theory of the radical right that emphasizes its reactive nature and views it as backlash against the political successes of minorities and concessions extracted on their behalf. Unlike approaches that focus on competition between the extreme and mainstream parties, the theory stresses the dynamics between radical right and non proximate parties that promote minority rights. Most notably, it derives the salience of identity issues in party politics from the polarization of the party
system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.
Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Cen... more Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the " illiberal turn " in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal " turns " and " swerves " , with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.
What explains different levels of clientelism across countries? Why do some politicians deliver c... more What explains different levels of clientelism across countries? Why do some politicians deliver clientelistic goods to their electoral constituencies and why do some voters demand them? We focus on the historical origins of trust in states and show that they have a lasting impact on contemporary patterns of patronage. The shift to programmatic politics reflects a historical transition from personalized trust in politicians to impersonal trust in bureaucracies tasked by political parties to implement policy. Past experience with public bureaucracy forms expectations of both voters and parties about the performance of the state and its ability to provide public goods. State capacity reputations thus determine the degree of clientelistic exchange across societies. In order to capture the strength of states, we focus on the historical juncture before the expansion of female suffrage. We use the ability of public bureaucracies to reduce infant deaths in the inter-war period as a proxy for historical state capacity and as an instrument to predict trust. We show that trust in the state, as an endogenous regressor, predicts clientelism. Data from eighty-eight electoral democracies, and micro-evidence from the most recent wave of the World Value Survey, provide supportive evidence for the theory.
Forthcoming: Lenka Bustikova. " The Radical Right in Eastern Europe, " in: Jens Rydgren (ed.), Th... more Forthcoming: Lenka Bustikova. " The Radical Right in Eastern Europe, " in: Jens Rydgren (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Abstract The radical right in Eastern Europe is similar to its Western European cousins in its emphasis on mobilization against minorities. Until recently, that mobilization was exclusively against minorities with electoral rights who have been settled in for centuries. The million plus influx of refugees in Europe from Syria expanded the portfolio of minorities to rally against and, paradoxically, westernized the Eastern European radical right in its opposition to Islam and migrants with non-European backgrounds. However, I argue that the radical right in Eastern Europe has three unique characteristics that distinguish it from its older Western European cousins: (1) left leaning positions on the economy, (2) linkages between identity and political opening, which leads to the association of minority policies with democratization and (3) the coexistence of radical right parties with radicalized mainstream parties. The contemporary radical right in Eastern Europe is a relatively new phenomenon, but has been steadily gaining in prominence. Although many radical right movements today embrace the legacy of the fascist movements of the inter-war period, their novelty lies in their adherence to the rules of electoral competition and-at least on the surface-their rejection of outright violence as a solution to internal political conflicts. Given the range of East European countries, in term of ethnic heterogeneity, economic performance and cultural legacies, it should not be surprising that radical right parties reflect this diversity. In some countries, such as Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia and Latvia, ethnicity and language create cleavages that structure radical right politics. In more ethnically homogeneous countries, such as Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland, the ethnic cleavage is less pronounced and radical right politics are focused either on mobilization against Roma or on social and religious issues that map onto particular party systems. Despite the new-fangled radical right in Eastern Europe, historical legacies cast a long shadow on contemporary events, due to the elevated sense that liberal democracy is not compatible with a vision of societies ruled exclusively by titular majorities. Since the dawn of East European democracies in the early 1990s, scholars have expressed pessimism about their prospects. The new political and economic regimes, it was argued, were expected to create a large impoverished underclass and a politically unsophisticated electorate,
Electoral behavior in comparatively young democracies shares significant similarities with that f... more Electoral behavior in comparatively young democracies shares significant similarities with that found in older, established Western democratic settings, and yet also differs in fundamental respects. Voters in newer democratic contexts make decisions based on group identities, policy divides, party attachments, and retrospective evaluations. However, in these settings, party systems are more fluidwith identifications, programs, and electoral options all subject to recurrent shifts. The experiences of both Latin America and Eastern Europe testify to the fact that the accumulation of electoral experiences is not sufficient to bring about party system stability and institutionalization. A consequence of high levels of volatility is that voters lack the same heuristic aids for decision-making that facilitate substantive, programmatic voting behavior in other countries. In Latin America and Eastern Europe, party attachments often have shallow roots, and left-right labels are under-utilized and under-supplied with coherent meaning. The complexity of decision-making in these environments has consequences for party behavior, in that it can motivate single-shot and short-sighted maneuvers and investments (such as abrupt program switches and clientelism). As such, it can lead citizens to discount policy promises, to expect material incentives for the vote, and to privilege more easily identifiable factors, such as economic performance and (to varying degrees) identity-based cleavages.
AbstractThis article explains the dissolution of Czechoslovak federation. It shows that the break... more AbstractThis article explains the dissolution of Czechoslovak federation. It shows that the breakdown in bargaining between Slovakia and the federal center in Prague resulted from the federal institutional framework, differences in fiscal policy preferences and elite patronage incentives to monopolize the spoils of state property sell-offs. Relatively less developed minority regions often seek greater autonomy in order to redress their economic backwardness through interventionist economic and social policies. Due to its veto powers, Slovakia was able to block central legislation, setting the stage for the divorce. At the same time, the federal government in the center was committed to a laissez-faire strategy of governance, which precluded any significant accommodation of the periphery. (Mostly) Czech politicians understood that yielding to Slovak claims would threaten to undercut their pro-market strategy and diminish Prague's exclusive access to the spoils of market reforms. In terms of the bargaining model, the center was not dependent on the periphery, which possessed a credible exit option. In fact, the periphery was perceived as a hindrance to the center's ability to pursue its fiscal goals and a fast economic transition, and as limiting Prague's exclusive access to a nascent revolving door between the upper echelons in politics and business.
This article investigates voters and sympathizers of Ukraine's radical right party, Svoboda. Usin... more This article investigates voters and sympathizers of Ukraine's radical right party, Svoboda. Using an original survey conducted in 2010, it shows that support for Svoboda was rooted less in extreme levels of xenophobia vis-à-vis Russians, and more in concerns about the support that the Russian minority receives from the state, fear of losing Ukrainian sovereignty, and economic anxiety. In contrast to the conventional view, the analysis suggests that support for Svoboda was not a function of inter-group ethnic hostilities; instead, it originated in perceived threats and anxieties about the character of the Ukrainian state.
Internet and social media created a public space for online debate on political and social issues... more Internet and social media created a public space for online debate on political and social issues. A debate is defined as a formal discussion on a set of related issues in which opposing perspectives and arguments are put forward. In this paper, we aim to develop automated perspective discovery techniques which would contribute to the understanding of frames that drive contention between radical right and liberal political actors in Eastern Europe using Slovakia as a case study. Based on computational analyses of their online corpus, we develop an analytical tool to identify contentious frames between ideological opposites and to predict online escalation. A frame is the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to en- courage certain interpretations and to discourage others. Our experimental data comprises nearly 10,000 documents downloaded from the official websites of radical right and liberal Slovak political parties span- ning a decade between 2004-2014. Our perspective discovery algorithm not only identifies contentious vs. ignored frames, but it also utilizes these frames to predict online escalation with an accuracy of 82.8% (F-measure). We also present qualitative analysis of the resultant frames.
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Papers by Lenka Bustikova
when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical
roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional
left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from
communist-era populist campaigns against “elitist” dissidents (from Charter 77) in the
Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also
adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting.
The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political
regimes.
system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.
when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical
roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional
left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from
communist-era populist campaigns against “elitist” dissidents (from Charter 77) in the
Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also
adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting.
The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political
regimes.
system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.