Punctuated equilibrium and progressive friction in socialist autocracy, democracy and hybrid regimes

Abstract The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale “punctuations”. Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities. However, based on our results, illiberal political systems, such as the hybrid regime of Viktor Orbán, are difficult to pin down on such a clear-cut continuum between democracy and autocracy as the level of punctuation differs by policy agendas from parliamentary debates to budgets.