Suchergebnisse

During the European Union accession negotiations, all post-communist Eastern European countries that became EU members established democratic institutions. Even though some new member states formed more strongly consolidated democratic institutions than others, all established institutions were sufficiently democratic to gain EU membership. Since acceding to the EU, some countries have continued to deepen their democracies, while others' democracies have stagnated or backtracked. In countries that backslid, some politicians only harmed the quality of democracy in the short-term, while others spurred democratic backsliding lasting beyond just one electoral cycle. This thesis examines the interaction between institutional engineering, political culture, and elite strategies to examine how these factors affect the likelihood of democratic backtracking in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Slovenia. By creating a theoretical framework that uses these three factors to predict the likelihood of democratic backtracking, this thesis seeks to improve understandings of why levels of democratic consolidation differ across East European countries that followed virtually the same institutional development process.

Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders' ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT's main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.