Erosion of Academic Freedom under Democratic Backsliding: The Case of the Central European University

As autocracies are rising and democracies are declining, academia is attacked as the source of truth and political dissent. Where there is a lack of freedom of knowledge, democracy is not possible. Higher education is increasingly politicized, and universities’ institutional autonomy is interfered with. As populist polarization strategies are widely utilized, public opinion may be skewed as right-leaning leaders intend. These are the present problems that need to be addressed. In 2017, the Hungarian government made an amendment on the national higher education law that essentially disabled the operation of the Central European University (CEU) within the country. In 2018, the CEU relocated from Budapest, Hungary to Vienna, Austria. A fairly unique case of a university’s relocation due to purely political reasons served as an instance to be further inquired. This thesis combined a single-case study design with process tracing to better understand the causal underpinnings of the self-perpetuating cycle of democratic backsliding and the erosion of academic freedom in a politically right-leaning populist country. By setting up two hypothetical pathways, one in which the executive branch captures the legislative and one in which populist polarization was used to reduce the role of the opposition and the public in Parliamentary decision making in order to pass amendments designed for the targeted removal of a specific higher educational institution. The research question is; how can the processes of the executive capture of the legislature, and populist polarization explain the erosion of academic freedom under democratic backsliding in Hungary? Having found that despite the initial assumption that the political opposition and the public can be muted, they did not remain silent and stood up as an interest group against the targeted attack that was possible due to a collapse of separation of powers and dismantled constitutional checks and balances. Accountability and transparency, as fundamental values of democracies, are severely damaged in Hungary that also manifests in the case of the CEU.