Filip Milacic: Abandoning Democracy for the Nation | Comparative Politics/Higher Research Seminar

Thus far, the literature has mainly tried to explain the erosion of democracy with the rise of polarization, authoritarian populism, economic crises leading to anxieties, and the weakening of external pro-democracy actors. Contrary to this dominant trend in the literature, I argue that in cases where political actors heavily employed nationalist appeals as a justification to subvert democracy, nationalism should serve as a separate and complementary explanation of democratic backsliding. By relying on the experiences of five countries (Serbia, Poland, Hungary, Israel, and Turkey) and using exclusive data obtained through surveys and interviews with actors involved, I answer three key questions: (1) How the subversion of democracy in the name of the nation unfolds, (2) Why many voters acquiesce to the subversion of democracy by nationalist elites, and (3) What matters in resisting the attacks on democracy with nationalist appeals. The answers to these questions reconcile demand-side and supply-side findings on democratic backsliding and shed new light on how to fight back more successfully.

Filip Milacic is senior researcher at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) in Vienna, visiting professor at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, and research affiliate at CEU’s Democracy Institute in Budapest. He held visiting scholar position at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and at MacMillan Center, Yale University. He is author of three books: Nationalstaatsbildung, Krieg und Konsolidierung der Demokratie: Kroatien, Serbien, und Montenegro (Springer 2017), Stateness and Democratic Consolidation: Lessons from Former Yugoslavia (Springer 2022), and Abandoning Democracy for the Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2026). His work was published in many academic journals such as Journal of Democracy, Ethnopolitics, Political Science Quarterly, Nations and Nationalism, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Nationalities Papers etc. He regularly comments for different media outlets such as Project Syndicate, Der Standard, Aftonbladet, NZZ, Stern, Falter etc.