Aktuell
12.11.2025
Institutskolloquium IfP (19.11.25) – Interest groups and the illiberal challenge: interest representation in backsliding democracies (focus on Hungary)
Speaker: Rafael Labanino (Nürtingen-Geislingen University / BOKU, Vienna)
Wednesday, November 19th 2025, 16:00 c.t. / Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft or online via Zoom
About the lecture: How do interest groups cope with an increasingly hostile political landscape in a growing number of democracies? Democratic backsliding – the decline in democratic quality driven by illiberal populist governments – has become increasingly widespread over the past 20 years. So far, the formal institutional framework of liberal democracy has proven to be much more resilient than deliberative democratic quality, which erodes much faster and to a greater extent. That is, under illiberal populist incumbents, civil society organisations find themselves shut out of national, sectoral, and local politics. They face ever scarcer public funding, amid bureaucratic harassment, and as targets of media campaigns that paint them as enemies of the people. Although civil society in general and interest representation in particular are the hallmarks of democratisation and good governance, political science research has only recently begun to address this illiberal challenge. In this talk, I will present our suggested theoretical framework alongside our empirical studies on “backsliding lobbying” and explain why this is very timely and relevant in Germany. I will also discuss the latest developments in Hungary, arguably the world’s least openly repressive and most resilient competitive authoritarian regime, which serves as a critical case in many of our analyses. I will explain why Orbán’s grip on the country has never seemed to be so fragile, why this does not necessarily mean his downfall, and why he and his regime are at a crossroads.
Rafael Labanino is a postdoctoral fellow at the Nürtingen-Geislingen University (HfWU) and the BOKU University, Vienna. He graduated in Political Science from the Eötvös Loránd University, and the Central European University in Budapest, and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Bern. His main research areas include civil society organisations and interest groups politics in Central and Eastern Europe with a focus on organisational adjustment strategies in response to authoritarian populism. He is also a research fellow at the Baden-Württemberg Climate Expert Council, where he monitors emissions reduction and sustainability transitions in traffic policy.
The lecture will be held in English