"Competitive Authoritarianism" or... ?

What Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt get wrong, and why it matters

May 15, 2025

Reading Heather Cox Richardson’s latest post this morning reminded me that I have a bone to pick with “How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt. The test they propose, given the modus operandi of the newfangled authoritarian, comes way too late.

The authors have written a book about “hybrid regimes,” which employ a style of governance they call “competitive authoritarianism.” Dictators of this form are wolves in sheep’s clothing: they win elections, and continue to hold elections, but hollow out democracies as they go, until, like zombie ants, those democracies are just a shell, under the control of a sinister usurping power.

Because they do not announce themselves, or anyway not until it is too late, we must remain vigilant. How will we know when our body politic has been infected by the authoritarian fungus?

Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt propose a test:

We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.

Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.

This is, I would argue, the wrong test. To be sure, there are places where creeping authoritarianism has made dissent unsafe. Russia is the clearest example, though at this point, I would argue that Putin is more of an old-school than a New Authoritarian, using the iron fist more than the velvet glove. In any case, while a country where dissent is punished is one that has lost its democracy, it is possible to lose it even as the people continue to protest vigorously to maintain their liberty.

The clearest prototype for what Trump and his supporters envision is not Putin’s Russia, but Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Orbán, after all, has been feted at multiple CPAC events, and his Danube Institute has been a regular advisor to the Heritage Foundation, which authored “Project 2025.” Hungary is the model of New Authoritarianism that we should be most concerned about.

Here is the thing: dissent is by and large safe in Hungary today. Popular opposition figures like Gergely Karacsony on the left and Péter Magyar on the right speak out regularly and challenge the ruling Fidesz party in every national election. People protest all the time. The government makes it rather difficult to take part in, or even see, the Pride parade, summer after summer – in 2019, despite a court ruling that the government must make it accessible, I wandered for a mile or two to find a place where there weren’t barricades about two blocks from the actual event (we joined at the very tail end). A 2025 law could be used to ban Pride events, but as of today, this year’s parade is scheduled for June 28.

Protests, in Budapest anyway, are common, and arrests, much less violence, are exceedingly rare. Hungarians are free to have and express any opinion they like. Why shouldn’t they? Because truly, it does not matter.

Richardson, and Levitsky et al make much of the “punishment” of universities, newspapers and other “civil society” institutions, but that is the wrong way to understand what New Authoritarians do. It is not that they are trying to crush dissent, locking down campus hotbeds and putting emerging Woodwards and Bernsteins out of work. What Orbán did, though it did involve punishing news media, universities and NGOs, was rather a kind of “reverse state capture” – the point was to take over these institutions not to silence dissent but to take control of them in order to amplify the message of the ruling party.

What Orbán and his Fidesz party did in regard to media is the best example. After his election win in 2010, Orbán funnelled EU contracts – the major flow of cash for the Hungarian economy – to his cronies. These cronies, suddenly billionaires, began to buy up major news outlets. Magyar Hirlap was the first, bought by a right-wing mogul in 2006 to shift it from left to right. In 2017, Orbán ally Lorinc Meszaros gained control of Optimus/Mediaworks, a conglomerate that owned many regional newspapers, as well as national papers like Vilaggazdasag and Nemzeti Sport. Two major dalies, Magyar Hirlap and Magyar Nemzet, were already pro-government. In 2020, Miklós Vaszily bought Indamedia, the parent company for Index.hu, a leading online opposition newspaper, leaning on journalists to quit or toe the party line. Others, like the leftist Nepszabadsag, founded during the 1956 revolt against Russia, were simply shut down.

What happened next is particularly interesting. As various Orbán allies came to be media moguls, they turned philanthropic. A pro-Fidesz lawyer established the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA), a nonprofit with ties to the ruling party, and owners of all the major news outlets donated their properties to the foundation, which today owns nearly 500 newspapers, television stations, magazines and news websites.

In much of the country, and increasingly in liberal Budapest, there are few if any news sources that do not have a pro-government slant. The government is able to carefully control information throughout the country, one of many steps it has taken to cement its hold on the 8 million rural voters who outnumber Budapesters four to one.

So go ahead, protest. After nationalizing the news, packing the judiciary and rewriting the Constitution, Fidesz has little to worry about.

What Levitsky et al call “competitive authoritarianism,” Viktor Orbán famously refers to as “illiberal democracy.” Both are misnomers. The point of the New Authoritarianism is exactly that there is no genuine competition, and that is why dissent can go unpunished. Fidesz will win because Fidesz has crowded out the opposition, not because they lean towards the bullet over the ballot. In this sense, “illiberal democracy” has it backwards. This is a system where people are free, but not self-governing.

“Liberal autocracy” is what we need to watch out for. We may lose our democracy while we are out, freely taking our grievances to the streets.