Orbán and democracy
Viktor Orbán's party has lost in a landslide and he has conceded the election. An opposition party will form a government in Hungary.
How should we update our priors about Orbán and his time in power, in light of this information?
A few relevant thoughts:
A bunch of prominent conservative commentators (Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen) suggested it was evidence that Orbán's Hungary was a democracy after all. This led to a strong (to put it mildly) counter-reaction from many liberals.
In a Bayesian framework, "Orbán concedes" does update our priors about him and his rule directionally away from authoritarianism. One can imagine a different leader, who was more of an authoritarian running a more autocratic state, refusing to concede and attempting to remain in office. Orbán did not do that. At the very least, conceding is not evidence that increases our prior he was an autocrat.
As a formal matter, the conservative commentators are suggesting that P(concedes|autocrat) is very small; essentially, their view is that anyone who voluntary leaves office is inherently a participant in small-d democracy. But that's silly. No one thinks Juruzelski or Pinochet were democrats. Whatever people might muse about a dictator "never peacefully leaving office," it's just not true in historical practice. Plenty do.
These things are ultimately on the margin. So the question might actually be how much do we learn about Orbán or Hungary from his concession in the face of an electoral landslide?
This is, in part, because modern autocrats usually elections. Some are complete shams, like in North Korea. But in many places they are formally legitimate elections that can be lost to actual opposition parties, with the autocrat rigging not the actual votes, but instead the necessary ingredients for running an opposition campaign (prohibiting media access, using the justice system to harass/deter opposition, making it difficult to get on the ballot, etc.). I think that the term competitive authoritarianism can be overused, but Orbán's Hungary is/was a plausible example of it.
A would-be autocrat will also weigh the probability of success in trying to hold power after an election loss. The bigger the loss, the tougher that will be. Orbán may have simply judged it impossible---or just -EV---to try and hold power. Too big of a probability of ending up in prison. Similarly, the more stable the democracy, the tougher that will be. This is one reason I worry less about Trump or other would-be autocrats in the U.S.; our democratic norms are strong and deep, to topple them would be very difficult. It would be irrational to try.
Which is one reason I don't think you can easily separate the individual autocrats from their systems. I'm not sure how many U.S. presidents would have jumped at the chance to entrench themselves in autocratic rule. Perhaps the number is higher than we would like to admit. But encased in the U.S. system of peaceful power transfer, they have no incentive to even consider it. It's like the free market. Individual firms don't have to believe in competition; they can simply be trying to destroy each other to create monopolies. As they are encased in legal regime that aims to promote competitive capitalism, the system can still thrive.
This is, in my view, Trump's situation. He has little respect for elections or democratic practices. He's absurdly corrupt. He's all for using the justice department against his enemies. He wants to undermine faith in elections and the judicial system. In December 2020 he was openly grasping around for ways to try to stay in power. And he never conceded. In my view, the 2020 Trump-Biden handover of power was a pacted transition more than a peaceful voluntary transfer of power; Trump saw the key actors and interests within his coalition withdraw their support for him, leaving him essentially no probability of holding power. So he walked away. That's not good---we want voluntary peaceful transfers of power---but it's also evidence that American democracy is very hard to break, even if you want to.
So I think both Orbán and Trump are instinctively autocrats. That they were constrained by a landslide election and a stable set of democratic institutions doesn't change that. But it does suggest the institutional constraints are an important piece of the would-be autocrat's calculus.
Democracy also isn't a binary. And it's not just about transfers of power in elections. Jonathan Bernstein wrote a nice item on this over the weekend. There's an entire spectrum that ranges from perfect republic to pure autocracy, and it very hard to draw bright lines about where "legitimate democracy" ends and "competitive authoritarianism" begins. It's messy. Douthat's point that parties in many democracies try to put their thumb on the election scale is both true and indicative of this problem.
A particularly tricky element nowadays is the concept of illiberal democracy. Is it really possible to have a democracy without basic liberal rights? My view is no; you need, at a minimum, freedoms of speech, press, association, and basic defendants rights in order for an electoral system to function. Many American liberals will tell you that you also need wide suffrage and basic equality; in their view, America wasn't a democracy in 1885 because the vast majority of citizens couldn't participate (some will carry this forward all the way to the 1965 VRA). This I'm less sure about; we don't really have a good way to talk about suffrage-limited systems that are otherwise authentic republics. American in 1885 wasn't a modern liberal democracy, but for those who were allowed to participate, it likely met our 21st century minimum-standards. That doesn't fit well on a democracy-authoritarian spectrum.