Article by Gabriella Ilonszki Professor Emerita (Corvinus University of Budapest, Department of Political Science) and Agnieszka Dudzińska (University of Warsaw) was published in European Political Science.
Governments tend to enjoy more scholarly attention than opposition forces as their role in decision-making is more prominent. Still, opposition behaviour and the opportunity structures available for the opposition are crucial in understanding prospective political developments. A comparative approach and a “most similar cases” research design is particularly useful as the opportunities and the constraints that opposition parties face can be clearly observed. Hungary and Poland are often placed in the same analytical framework from the period of their ‘negotiated revolutions’ to their autocratic turn. This article looks behind this apparent similarity focusing on opposition behaviour. The analysis demonstrates that the executive–parliament power structure, the vigour of the extra-parliamentary actors, and the opposition party frame have the strongest influence on opposition behaviour, and they provide the sources of difference between the two country cases: in Hungary an enforced power game and in Poland a political game constrain opposition opportunities and opposition strategic behaviour.
Ilonszki, G., & Dudzinska, A. (2021). Opposition behaviour against the third wave of autocratisation: Hungary and Poland compared. EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-021-00325-x
Ilonszki, Gabriella is Professor Emerita at the Department of Political Science at Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research interests include comparative political studies with a Central and East European focus. Her more recent publications in the opposition theme include: Ilonszki, Gabriella, Francesco Marangoni, Anna M. Palau (2021) Can Opposition Parties Be Responsible? Parliamentary Affairs, and Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki eds (2018) Opposition Parties in European Legislatures. Conflict or Consensus? Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems, London and New York.