Rising Majoritarianism as Challenge For Democratic Governance - Turkey in Comparative Perspective

Introduction: In many countries, including EU members and their close neighbours, we can observe the so called democratic backsliding in the current decade. Political scientists have been discussing intensively the reasons behind this process. The proposed paper focuses on the rising phenomenon of majoritarianism which seems to contribute to the problems of democratic governance – particularly in the polarised and diverse societies in terms of the world outlook, beliefs and political sympathies - because of the dominance of a particular political and social group or groups in a political system. The aim of the article is to analyse different paths of development of majoritarianism in the 1990s and the 2000s and its impact on the political regime in the current decade. The case of Turkey as one of the “hardest” cases to indicate the phenomenon is compared to some selected states from Central Europe to verify the main hypothesis that the structural factors emerging within the historical process are behind the development of majoritarianism, which has been even strengthened in the current decade, including the pandemic period in 2020. Methods and materials: The author takes the qualitative approach. He uses the process-tracing method to investigate the development of majoritarianism in selected states and conducts the comparative analysis to identify the similarities and differences between Turkey and two Central European states - Hungary and Poland with reference to the analysed phenomenon. Results: At the turn of the 1990s and the 2000s a concentration of the party system, producing a decrease in the number of parties in the parliament and a rising party system polarization that strengthened the two largest parties and developed two ideological blocks resulted in the development of majoritarianism in the 2000s – mainly in Turkey and Hungary. It did not lead to the democracy decline at this time. In the second decade of the 21st century single-party governments (or coalition governments with one dominating party) sharing the majoritarian understanding of democracy have consolidated their power at the cost of the weakening of the opposition as well as have strengthened the executive – in relation to the legislature and judiciary. These processes have led to limitations in working of checks and balances system but also political and social pluralism due to increasing dominance of incumbents in political and social life of analyzed countries, particularly during the pandemic period. Discussion and Conclusions: In Hungary and Poland the phenomenon of majoritarianism contributes so far to lowering the quality of democracy – in comparison with the Turkish situation reflecting rather the gradual change of the political regime to less democratic (i.e. a new type of authoritarianism).