AUTHLIB researchers Bálint Mikola (Central European University), Piotr Zagórski (SWPS University), Dean Schafer (Mississippi State University), Tomas Cirhan (Charles University), Jonas Suchanek (Czech Academy of Sciences), and Dominik Kevicky (Masaryk University) published an article titled “Cultural policies of populist governments in central and Eastern Europe: a comparative review” in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
The recent rise of populist and illiberal actors in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the concomitant democratic backsliding has generated notable scholarly interest; however, the implications of populism for cultural policy remain understudied. Since culture defines popular tastes and shapes interpretations of national identity and history, we adopt a comparative perspective to evaluate what impact these actors had on cultural policies between 2010 and 2023, using a combination of qualitative analysis of discursive and legislative changes, and quantitative text analysis. The findings indicate that the instrumentalization of cultural policies has been a function of ideology: while the ‘thick ideological’, radical right populist governing parties of Hungary and Poland abused culture as a vehicle for transmitting their nationalist narratives, their ‘thin populist’, technocratic Czech and Slovak counterparts took a more pragmatic approach to cultural policy. These findings highlight the impact of populist ideology with thick, cultural features on cultural policy.
