Hanna Folsz, a 2025-26 Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has received the 2026 Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) European Politics and Society Section. Her paper also received Honorable Mention for the Sage Best Paper Award from APSA’s Comparative Politics Section and Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award from APSA’s Democracy and Autocracy Section. The awards recognize her article, “Economic Retaliation and the Decline of Opposition Quality,” which examines how aspiring autocrats use economic retaliation to discourage political challengers and undermine democratic competition.

Drawing on original data from Hungary, Folsz shows that opposition candidates and their families often face consequences such as firings, blacklisting, tax audits, and the loss of business opportunities after entering politics during autocratization. Her research finds that these pressures reduce political ambition among opposition-aligned elites and shrink the pool of experienced, highly qualified candidates willing to run for office.

Folsz received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in June 2026. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian, dominant-party regimes, with particular attention to the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At CDDRL, she has been an active member of the center's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab.

Next fall, Folsz will be an incoming Fellow at the Harvard Academy and, in 2027, an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at IE University in Segovia, Spain. She will continue working on her book manuscript, which examines why establishment oppositions struggle to win elections under democratic decline and how this challenge can be surmounted.

On Thursday, April 16, Daniel Kelemen (UC Merced) and CDDRL predoctoral fellow Hanna Folsz discussed the consequential outcome of the April 2026 Hungarian election: the victory of Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in a Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) seminar co-hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Center.

Daniel Kelemen opened the talk, first offering an overview of Viktor Orbán's rise to power. In 2010, Orbán won Hungary’s nationwide election with over two-thirds majority, a majority large enough to allow him to amend the constitution. Having suffered an electoral defeat in the past, Orbán worked to centralize his power. He captured referees — courts and independent bodies — seized control of the media, and demonized and undermined the opposition. Orbán effectively changed the rules of the game, tilting the electoral playing field. 

Kelemen states that there are cases in which smaller authoritarian groups within a larger system are tolerated or protected by national parties because they deliver votes. Orbán operated with the support of Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, who largely stopped the EU from taking action against Orbán. Orbán’s party, the Fidesz Party, was a part of Merkel’s EU-wide party, the European People’s Party (EPP), a center-right, Christian party. This support, along with the emigration of dissatisfied voters and continued funding from the EU, helped Orbán stay in power. 

However, Orbán’s Fidesz Party was kicked out of the EPP in 2021. Merkel, who was a strong supporter of Orbán, left office in 2022. Orbán’s policy also became more extreme, raising more concern from European member states. In 2022, the EU Commission cut funding to Hungary, suspending 32 billion euros. Kelemen identifies this suspension of funds as an effective step against Hungary’s regime. 

Kelemen then outlined the implications of Orbán’s fall for Hungary, the EU, and international actors, including Russia and the United States. For Hungary, it means full regime change, as the Tisza Party will likely take efforts to undo Orbán’s autocratic policy changes. For the EU, it means that policy on Ukraine and Russia will be different, because Orbán was using his veto to prevent support for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. For the US and Russia, Russia lost its supporter and ear in the EU, and the Trump administration lost its closest ally in Europe. On a global note, Orbán was a key figure in trying to bring together far-right populists. After he was kicked out of the EPP, he formed a more autocratic-focused party called MEGA (Make Europe Great Again). 

On November 13, 2025, Hanna Folsz, a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, presented her research on “Economic Retaliation and the Decline of Opposition Quality.” This CDDRL research seminar built on Folsz’s focus on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. 

Hungary has experienced significant democratic decline, spurred by Fidesz Party leader Viktor Orbán’s rise to power in 2010. Since then, armed with a parliamentary supermajority, the Fidesz Party has taken several democratic-eroding actions: rewriting electoral rules, capturing the courts and media, and repressing independent civil society. Prior to these actions, Hungary had close elections. But after 2010 and the Fidesz Party’s changes, elections are no longer close. Illiberal populists worldwide — like Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, and Erdoğan — look to Orban’s agenda as a template on how to dismantle democracy, and how to maintain voter support while doing so. In Hungary, opposition politicians, candidates, advocates, and voters do not face violence or arrests for their political views. However, Folsz argues that there exists a pervasive fear in opposition circles stemming from the potential for economic retaliation. Folsz recalls examples of this from interviews she conducted in Hungary.

In Miskolc, a city in Northeastern Hungary, the local head of the socialist party recalled a story from 201,9 when the party was able to convince a well-respected businessman to run for a seat. However, after agreeing to become a candidate, the candidate’s wife said, “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you think about your daughter? She will lose her job if you do this!” The couple’s daughter worked at a local passport office, a state-dependent job. The candidate withdrew his candidacy. His replacement was an elderly woman who was unable to campaign. The socialist party lost the race.

Another interviewee, Tibor Zaveczki, ran as an opposition candidate. He was fired from a state-owned company for doing so. Zaveczki took the case to court, armed with secret recordings of his firing. The recording included a conversation between Zaveczki and his manager, in which his manager said: “The city leadership decided not to continue working with you in our company.” Zaveczki asked, “So, to put it plainly, was my mistake that I openly declared I was in the opposition?” His manager responded, “Of course, that matters. That’s obvious. You’re not stupid.”

Folsz identified that existing literature on democratic backsliding often focuses on the incumbent's strategy to dismantle democratic institutions and on why voters tolerate these actions. However, the role of opposition parties is rarely addressed. Folsz went into her research asking the question: Why do opposition parties struggle to challenge aspiring autocrats in elections? Folsz asserts that the main reason is that opposition parties have a growing political talent deficit in democratic declines, driven by an authoritarian strategy that Folsz calls elite economic coercion. This entails a credible threat of economic retaliation for opposition candidacy that discourages opposition political entry, reduces opposition candidate quality, and weakens opposition parties.

Folsz outlines two types of economic retaliation. The first is employment-oriented, where state-sector employees might face fear of dismissal from their job, demotions, or lack of promotions if they or a family member runs for office with the opposition party. The second is enterprise-oriented, where business owners might face a credible threat in the form of tax audits, the cancellation of state contracts, or the denial of grants, or even be blacklisted by suppliers or clients. Folsz outlines the effects of elite economic coercion, stating that the coercion leads to a higher cost of candidacy, which then leads to deterrence of political entry. This results in a lower opposition candidate quality and ultimately weakens opposition parties.

Folsz then empirically tested these three steps of the theory: retaliation, deterrence, and endogenous entry. Using tax enforcement as a proxy for economic retaliation, Folsz found a significant increase in tax enforcement in firms that had links to opposition candidates, and found the effect stronger with opposition-owned firms. Folsz also found that these firms were less likely to stay in business and decreased in their number of employees and profit compared to incumbent party-linked firms after the firm owner’s or director’s political entry. State dependence is a very central deterrent of candidacy– a survey experiment shows that state dependents are about 13 percent less likely to join opposition politics as candidates. Folsz used data on candidate background to show that the quality of opposition candidates declined compared to the incumbent Fidesz Party candidates during Hungary’s democratic decline.

Folsz concluded by stressing that the weakening of opposition parties is key to authorization, and candidate recruitment is a central challenge for opposition parties during democratic decline.

According to the Freedom House project’s 2021 Freedom in the World assessment, 2020 saw a sharp acceleration in the global decline of democracy. By their measure, fewer than a fifth of the world’s population now live in fully free countries. This is part of a longer trend of democratic decline and rising authoritarianism that’s been underway across the globe for the last 30 years.

Why is this happening? That’s the question Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Barack Obama, tries to tackle in his new book, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made.

Rhodes joined FSI Director Michael McFaul on the new season of the World Class Podcast to discuss the book and the stories it tells of incredible individuals pushing back against autocratic regimes around the world.