Most political science interpretations of the post-2010 Orban regime have been written
either within the framework of populism or in the democratization paradigm. We have
learned much from these papers about Hungary's drift in an authoritarian direction,
but they also have drawbacks. This article aims to fill the gap between these two
approaches and offers a theoretical framework to analyze the impact of populism and
other trends of contemporary politics (like de-alignment, growing electoral volatility,
citizens' disengagement, personalization, legitimacy problems, the decline of party
membership and partisanship, the mediatization of politics, etc.) on the political
regime. It argues that these trends add up to an authority and regime type that can
be conceptualized by Weber's concept of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD). PLD forms
a new hybrid regime type that differs from comparative authoritarianism and other
hybrid regime types known from the literature in three respects. First, PLD is less
about institutional framework and procedures than about the sources of legitimacy;
second, it serves better to understand how the regime works than measuring its distance
from liberal democracy; third, it is an ideal type that aims to reveal the endogenous
logic of democracy that generates authoritarian elements of the regime. The article
also demonstrates the suitability of the concept of PLD for empirical research through
presenting a structured case study of the Orban regime. The PLD model enables us to
reveal the endogenous logic of the Orban regime and the impact of populist governance
on it.
