The effects of democratic backsliding on cross-border regional policy-making in Central Europe : the case of Hungary’s border regions

The paper engages with the concept of democratic backsliding (Backe and Sitter, 2020; Bermeo 2016; Greskovits 2015) with relation to policymaking in a specific territorial governance space, namely cross-border regions. Many scholars have pointed to the lack of democratic legitimacy of cross-border regional policy-making processes, but usually this has been in the context of technical-bureaucratic and/or neo-liberal modes of governing. There has so far been no attention to what happens when borderlands are drawn into democratic backsliding processes. The paper uses the seven national borders of Hungary to analyze policy-making processes in three steps. It first discusses the deteriorating democracy index of the V-Dem project with relation to the Hungarian borderlands. It then applies a basic policy cycle approach to discuss how policy-making in the respective borderland regions may be affected by deficiencies in democratic policy-making processes at the national level. Finally, the paper investigates attitudes among voters and cross-border cooperation organizations in the border regions. The paper argues that backsliding democracy has consequences across the different dimensions of democracy and through the stages of the policy cycle, although unevenly so, with the electoral and participatory and dimensions of democracy and the early stages of the policy cycle more affected. In addition, the finding that citizens residing close to border crossings tend to be right leaning indicates a presence of nationalist attitudes likely to lead to views on borders as protection rather than obstacles to be overcome. This implies a changed discursive meaning of borders, possibly affecting the deliberative component of democracy. © 2022, The Author.