Slovakia's Conflicting Camps

Mesežnikov, Grigorij; Gyárfášová, Oľga

doi:10.1353/jod.2018.0046

Cited by 54 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…The left column of Table 4 depicts the Hungarian–Slovak political cleavage over language and Hungarian minority rights rather clearly. This is consistent with decade-old fights over the status of the Hungarian minority, particularly its language rights (Bútora 2007; Haughton and Ryba 2008; Mesežnikov, Gyárfášová, and Smilov 2008; Deegan Krause and Haughton 2009). Radical parties tend to escalate on language policies: they respond strongly when ethnic parties talk about the “language law,” “minority language” and “mother tongue.”…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Predicting Partisan Responsiveness: A Probabilistic Text Mining Time-Series Approach

et al. 2019

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Predicting Partisan Responsiveness: A Probabilistic Text Mining Time-Series Approach

et al. 2019

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“…Hungary and Poland are paradigmatic cases of democratic backsliding (Scheppele 2016, 2018; Sitter et al 2016; Kovács and Scheppele 2018; Grzymala-Busse 2019). However, as the backsliding narrative gained traction, the term has been widely applied to the post-communist region (Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018; Hanley and Vachudova 2018; Pehe 2018; Mesežnikov and Gyárfášová 2018; Vachudová 2019). The early optimism is gone; “the narrative of progress in the region is dead, replaced by democratic backsliding—and even sliding into authoritarianism” (Hanley and Vachudová 2018, 276); “the idea that democracy is backsliding in East-Central Europe is fast becoming the consensus view” (Dawson and Hanley 2016, 21).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The EU’sEnfants Terribles: Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe since 2010

Bakke¹,

Sitter²

2020

Perspect. polit.

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In the academic literature, Hungary and Poland are often cited as paradigmatic cases of democratic backsliding. However, as the backsliding narrative gained traction, the term has been applied to the rest of the post-communist region, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We suggest that this diagnosis is in part based on conceptual stretching, and set out to rescue the concept as an analytical tool. We then assess the extent of backsliding in the four Visegrád countries, explaining backsliding (and the relative lack of it) in terms of motive, opportunity, and the strength or weakness of opposing or constraining forces. We conclude that the situation is not as desperate as some commentators would have it: democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland was contingent on a few exceptional factors, and EU leaders therefore need not be paralysed by the fear of contagion when they contemplate forceful action against backsliding member states.

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“…In Central and Eastern Europe, the non-inclusive ethno-nationalist definition of the in-group feeds into the contemporary support for neo-authoritarian populists, who promote exclusive versions of national and religious communities (Zielonka and Rupnik 2020). An increasingly polarized identity politics (Mesežnikov and Gyárfášová 2018) of playing upon standard preexisting ideological cleavages (Catholic conservative vs. liberal attitudes) are combined with ethno-nationalist exclusivity (against minorities, migrants, and refugees). And this concerns the entirety of the public domain.…”

Section: Social Inclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Curious Case of Slovakia

Nováková

2020

The International Journal of Social Quality

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A singular focus on the formal institutional reforms and economic variables misses the mark when it comes to explaining the decreasing support for liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. This article suggests that over thirty years after the beginning of the “transition to democracy,” a closer look at the conditional factors of social quality can shed a different light on the transformation of societal realities. In particular, it pays attention to the extent to which people are able to participate in social and societal relationships under conditions that enhance their well-being, capacity, and individual potential. Slovakia is chosen as a case study, as it is both representative of some of the wider malaises characteristic of the younger European democracies and as it is a rather interesting example of liberal democracy within the region.

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Slovakia's Conflicting Camps

Cited by 54 publications

References 1 publication

Predicting Partisan Responsiveness: A Probabilistic Text Mining Time-Series Approach

Predicting Partisan Responsiveness: A Probabilistic Text Mining Time-Series Approach

The EU’sEnfants Terribles: Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe since 2010

The Curious Case of Slovakia

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