In this piece,Tamas Kowalik, a Leadership Communication doctoral student, a graduate research assistant at the Staley School of Leadership Studies, and a research project manager at the Kansas Leadership Center, offers a perspective of how core concepts within leadership and democracy have difficulty being translated across culture and context.
Mind the Context: (Neo)liberal democracy vs. illiberal democracy
“Context matters” may seem banal, but nothing demonstrates it better than a cross-cultural application of a framework that has been initially designed in the U.S. context. The recently developed Civic Capacity Index (Chrislip 2020) measures citizens’ capacity to participate in public problem-solving. Its application in Hungary – a different cultural context – raises challenges calling attention to cultural contexts’ significance.
Neoliberalism – built upon the free market, private property, the rule of law, and individual freedom – has been around with us for several decades. People became familiar with its positive and negative attributes. It has recently been challenged however, by a new ideology and regime, called illiberal democracy. Illiberal regimes are characterized by authoritarianism, strong state concept and state intervention, weak civic and protest culture, curtailed freedoms, populism, high rate of corruption, and nepotism. The shift of Hungarian democracy is a good example, as Körösényi (2020) summarizes: “From 2010 onwards, however, Viktor Orbán’s premiership has dramatically changed this perception, and the country has become an illustration of populism, illiberalism and a drift towards authoritarian rule.” (Körösényi, Illés and Gyulai, 2020, p. 6) Further examples of illiberal regimes in Europe are Turkey and Russia. Continue reading “The Illiberal Challenge of Neoliberalism: Making sense of leadership and civic capacity in cross-cultural contexts”
