Turkey and Hungary's Autocratic Ruling Parties Similar To US Republican Party, Study Finds

A study from a Swedish university found that the Republican party has veered dramatically right in the past two decades, and now has more in common with the ruling parties of autocracies in Turkey and Hungary than participants in Western democracies.

While the information is alarming, many on social media who lived through the change were already well aware of it. Commenters reacted with both resignation and determination to fight back.

The study comes from the University of Gothenburg, and seeks to quantify the positions of political parties with a new V-Dem system. Anna Lührmann, the program’s deputy director, told the Guardian that the Republican transformation was “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.

The Democratic party scored slightly above average, comparable to the various centrist parties in Europe. The GOP, however, seemed to be following the same track as Fidesz, the Hungarian youth movement which grew to an authoritarian party under now-dictator Viktor Orbán. Hungary is now the first non-democracy in the European Union.

There are other comparable movements. India’s BJP and Turkey’s AKP made similar changes, as well as the Catholic Law and Justice party in Poland that just last week managed to ban virtually all abortions. Ideological ties make for political ties as well: Trump has cozied up to dictators and autocrats including those listed above.

Lührmann said those types of parties initiate a cycle that erodes democracy: weak democracies allow them to win power undemocratically, undermining confidence in democracy and alienating other parties and their own supporters from democratic norms.

“We’ve seen similar shifts in parties in other countries where the quality of democracy has declined in recent years, where democracy has been eroding,” she said. “It fits very well into the pattern of parties that erode democracy once they’re in power.”

Autocratic parties also demonize their opponents, as Trump does regularly. This incites political violence, such as the recently-foiled plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and take her into the woods for a “trial.”

The trend isn’t limited to the U.S. The entire world has seen a decline in confidence in democracy. Today, for the first time in a century, the majority of the world’s population lives in non-democracies.