The Application of the Principles of Political Survival in Hybrid Regimes: A Case-Study of Hungary

The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith has established a clear list of five key principles which are referred as the rules of political survival, which are yet to be tested in hybrid regimes. Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, which has been showing signs of hybridity, offers the possibility to test these five principles. In order to make proper conclusions, the most important measures of Orbán are confronted in this qualitative research with the recommendations of de Mesquita and Smith, in order to determine if the rules of political survival are obeyed or neglected by the Hungarian Prime Minister, and to see if these measures have positive or negative effects on his regime from the perspective of political survival. The results have shown that the survival strategy of Orbán is based on the five principles of political survival, and therefore the approach of the Selectorate theory should further be applied on hybrid regimes.