Cultural policies in illiberal democracies: a conceptual framework based on the Polish and Hungarian governing experiences

ABSTRACT

Different governments in Europe are advancing corporatist mechanisms to foster a homogenizing and conservative understanding of culture. Illiberal practices framed within these policies include a delegated censorship and several measures based on xenophobic claims. Despite the importance of this phenomenon, the available literature on cultural policies has not adequately addressed it so far. This article proposes a conceptual framework to distinguish these illiberal cultural policies from the ones framed by liberal democracies on one hand and totalitarian regimes on the other end. This conceptual scheme is developed through a qualitative methodology based on a thorough review of the relevant literature currently available, a series of semi-structured interviews with relevant actors and a comparative analysis of the cultural policies developed by the ‘populist radical right’ governments in Poland and Hungary.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural policies
• radical right
• new authoritarianism
• populism
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘The edge of cultural participation’ (Zagreb 07/11/2019); ‘Cultural policies: What’s new?’ (Paris 30/01/2020); ‘Cultural Policy Transformations: The Rise of Illiberalism’ (Friedrichshafen, 05/03/2020).

2. In line with Weber’s definition, we understand the concept of ideal type as a form of ‘guidance for the construction of hypotheses’ (Weber 1949, 90). The notion of ideal type will be used to frame the boundaries between these regimes – a range of authoritarian practices — and as an instrument to classify and interpret cultural policies practices within them.

3. For instance, the Venezuelan cultural policies, which have shown different corporatist and authoritarian practices through the last years (Kozak Rovero 2015).

4. It should be taken into account that while the concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ was originally developed by Zakaria (1997) to describe authoritarian formal democracies in Africa and Asia, we use it in this paper to frame recent European cultural policies that manifest certain continental specificities. Thus, these may limit the application of this framework to cultural policies developed in other socio-historical contexts.

5. We use corporatism in this document as a form of framing governance interactions between social and state actors, where the state has a direct role in ‘creating the patterns of interaction’ (Peters, Guy, Pierre 2016, 109).

6. Following the French tradition, both the Ministry of Culture and regional/local governments have a major influence on the cultural system through funding and symbolic intervention (Chartrand and McCaughey 1989).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lluis Bonet

Lluís Bonet is professor of applied economy at the University of Barcelona, specialized in cultural economics, cultural policies and arts management. He is the Director of the Cultural Management Graduate program (with a PhD, three Master degrees and four long live learning programs in the field). He has been research fellow at MIT and the University of Montpelier and invited lecturer in over 40 different countries. Winner of the CAC Research Prize, he has been President of the Jury of the Cultural Policy Research Award and of ENCATC, vice-president of AAAE and board member of the Association of Cultural Economics International, among other responsabilities.

Mariano Martín Zamorano

Mariano Martín Zamorano holds a Cum Laude PhD in Culture and Heritage Management from the University of Barcelona (UB).  He is specialized in public cultural policies and has several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and book chapters in this field. He has participated in several research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Commission (H2020), among other institutions. He has been Visiting Scholar at the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy of the Ohio State University, Associate Professor at the UB, and he currently teaches at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and the UB. Since 2010, he is member of the Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society (CECUPS).