Photo: “Polish flag with coat of arms“, by Orem licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Hue modified from the original
Kubik, Jan. “Illiberal Challenge to Liberal Democracy.” The Taiwan Journal of Democracy 8, no. 2 (2012): 79-89.
Abstract
The essay offers three sets of ideas. First, I define illiberal challenge and identify
its three components (populism, organizational antipluralism, and ideological
monism). Second, I discuss three causes of this challenge: economic, political,
and cultural. Third, using this framework, I analyze the Polish case, concluding
that the illiberal challenge in this country is considerable, but too weak to
threaten liberal democracy. Important argument is that, in order to explain the
staying power of illiberalism (or any other ideology), we need a theory that
accounts for both the demand and supply sides of politics, particularly cultural
politics.
