<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>National or supranational consultations on general policy questions are unusual phenomena. Nevertheless, they seem to play an important role in the political life of the community either because they might be considered as rudimentary forms of deliberative practices or because they are important strategic tools in the hands of political actors. Given this salience of consultations from both normative­deliberative and descriptive-strategic perspectives, it is surprising that academic analyses of national consultations are scarce. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on one of the most well­known examples of nation-wide consultations, the series of national consultations in Hungary. It aims to present why national consultations gradually lost their deliberative character and how they have been transformed into a strategic instrument for mobilising supporters.</p>
</abstract>

National or supranational consultations on general policy questions are unusual phenomena. Nevertheless, they seem to play an important role in the political life of the community either because they might be considered as rudimentary forms of deliberative practices or because they are important strategic tools in the hands of political actors. Given this salience of consultations from both normative­deliberative and descriptive-strategic perspectives, it is surprising that academic analyses of national consultations are scarce. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on one of the most well­known examples of nation-wide consultations, the series of national consultations in Hungary. It aims to present why national consultations gradually lost their deliberative character and how they have been transformed into a strategic instrument for mobilising supporters.

From Deliberation to Pure Mobilisation? The Case of National Consultations in Hungary

Head of the Center for Constitutional Politics at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and senior research fellow at the University of Public Service in Budapest

political scientist, he received his PhD in political sciences from the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2015. Currently he is research fellow at the Eötvös Loránd Research Network Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest

Politics in Central Europe

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

National or supranational consultations on general policy questions are unusual phenomena. Nevertheless, they seem to play an important role in the political...

From Deliberation to Pure Mobilisation? The Case of National Consultations in Hungary

Published Online: Apr 10, 2022

Page range: 79 - 109

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pce-2022-0004

Keywords
deliberative democracy, direct democracy, populism, legitimacy, national consultation

© 2022 Kálmán Pócza et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

From Deliberation to Pure Mobilisation? The Case of National Consultations in Hungary

Published Online: Apr 10, 2022

Page range: 79 - 109

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pce-2022-0004

Keywordsdeliberative democracy, direct democracy, populism, legitimacy, national consultation

© 2022 Kálmán Pócza et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
deliberative democracy, direct democracy, populism, legitimacy, national consultation