Democratic Erosion in Central Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Autocratic Mechanisms in the Visegrád Group Countries
Democratic Erosion in Central Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Autocratic Mechanisms in the Visegrád Group Countries
Journal: Politics in Central Europe. Politics in Central Europe is an open access, independent and internationally peer-reviewed scientific journal in political science and international relations. The journal was established in 2005 in the cooperation with the Central European Political Science Association (CEPSA). Politics in Central Europe publishes original, peer-reviewed manuscripts focusing on issues in comparative politics, policy analysis, political theory, international relations, security studies, regional studies and other sub-disciplines of political science, as well as original theoretical or conceptual analyses. More on the journal can be found here.
Date of Publication: July 27, 2026.
Author: Tomáš Krim. Krim is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science and Anglophone Studies, Metropolitan University Prague, under the supervision of Professor Karel Klíma. His research focuses on political science and constitutional law in Central Europe, specifically exploring direct democracy and its legal limitations. He is actively developing comparative models encompassing direct, participatory and deliberative democracy. His work also examines contemporary Central European populist discourse and the mechanisms of democratic erosion within the Visegrád Group.
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Abstract: Central Europe, long considered a model of successful post-communist democratic consolidation, has undergone a dramatic transformation in the early twenty-first century. This study analyses democratic backsliding in the Visegrád Group countries in the period 2023–2026, identifying four key mechanisms of autocratisation: media capture, the securitisation of political repression, the dismantling of institutional checks and economic state capture. The theoretical framework synthesises three complementary concepts: Scheppele’s autocratic legalism, explaining how democracy is dismantled through formally legal procedures; Innes’s theory of state capture, illuminating actor motivations; and Bermeo’s executive aggrandisement, describing its temporal dynamics. Košař and Šipulová’s typology of court-packing (expanding, emptying and swapping) supplies the operational tools. The study reveals marked variation: Hungary is a consolidated autocracy, Slovakia accelerated towards repression after the 2024 assassination attempt, Poland shows the difficulty of democratic restoration after the 2025 presidential election, while the Czech Republic exhibits signs of blocked hybridisation. The findings demonstrate that European integration alone cannot prevent backsliding once domestic safeguards are weakened, and that the principal weakness of the EU response lies not in a lack of instruments but in the political reluctance to deploy them. The study contributes a new hybrid model, ‘Digital Sovereign Corporatism’.
Why ISSE Is Recommending This Article: ISSE is recommending this article because it provides a comparative examination of the institutional mechanisms through which constitutional democracies can be gradually transformed without abrupt constitutional rupture. Rather than focusing solely on elections or partisan competition, the study analyzes how executive aggrandizement, autocratic legalism, securitization, judicial restructuring, and state capture interact to reshape constitutional governance over time. These themes closely intersect with ISSE's research on the evolution of exceptional powers, illustrating how emergency governance, institutional restructuring, and the expansion of executive authority can become embedded within the ordinary operation of the state.
