The De- and Re-Democratization (DRD) Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invites you to the 52nd session of the Rooftop Seminar.

You can check our past events here.

If you would like to attend, please register here.

Please keep in mind that external guests cannot enter the building without prior registration. Due to space restrictions, attendance is limited. We ask registered visitors to pick up their temporary visiting card at the reception. The event is not open to the press.

The paper, co-authored by Róbert Imre Csehi (Corvinus University) and Edit Zgut-Przybylska, is available upon request from the authors.

Abstract:

Despite an interest in populism, the way political opposition reacts to the populist challenge is seriously understudied. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at the case of Budapest and how it has dealt with Viktor Orbán’s populism for the past few years. Theoretically, the paper problematizes the national-local nexus within populism research, and concentrates on responses to populism. With this, it not only adds to existing research which considered local manifestations of populism rather than local opposition to populism, but also maps political reactions that foreground democratic values such as pluralism, inclusion and solidarity. It is argued that these normative commitments are crucial in shaping local-level counter-populist strategies. The overall expectation is that local-level counter-populism repeals anti-democratic and anti-plural dynamics pursued by a populist national government. The paper provides a summary of the responsive strategies of the lord mayor, the district mayors, and their teams which were gathered through semi-structured interviews and an analysis of official documents and media reports.

Speaker:

Dr. Edit Zgut-Przybylska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (IFIS) in the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and a visiting fellow at CEU Democracy Institute. She received her PhD in Sociology from GSSR at IFIS PAN, holds an MA in Political Science from ELTE TÁTK and graduated as a journalist at Bálint György Journalism Academy. Her research interest covers informality and populism in the context of democratic backsliding and the constraining role of the European Union. She is a visiting lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department.  Synthetic versions of her work are available on POLITICO EUROPE, Foreign Policy and Visegrad Insight. Edit held a re:constitution fellowship 2022/2023, a Rethink.CEE fellowship at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a Visegrad Insight Fellowship. She worked at Political Capital Research Institute and was a journalist at various Hungarian media outlets.

Discussant:

Zsofia Bocskay is a post-doctoral researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute and a member of the Research Group on De- and Re-Democratization. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Koç University, Istanbul, where she remains affiliated. Her research focuses on political communication in autocratizing states, with particular emphasis on party strategies such as issue emphasis, populist appeals, and negativity in campaigns. While her own work centers on elite communication, she also studies media systems and voter behavior more broadly, including the role of misinformation, issue positioning, and political news consumption in competitive authoritarian regimes. Zsofia pays special attention to local elections, examining how authoritarian populist actors consolidate power and how opposition forces can effectively challenge them. Her research has been published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Chair:

Flora Hevesi holds an MA in public policy (2023) from Central European University and a BA in international relations (2019) from Corvinus University of Budapest. During her studies, she was a member of Rajk College for Advanced Studies, where she attended additional courses on methodology, social sciences and philosophy. Her research interests lie in the field of democratic, civic and environmental engagement, education and political philosophy. Before joining the Democracy Institute, she worked as a student consultant for the International Press Institute and junior analyst for 21 Research Center.